From Fox News (thereby assuring that it will be discounted by the Left):
You’ve heard this shocking “fact” before — on TV and radio, in newspapers, on the Internet and from the highest politicians in the land: 90 percent of the weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the United States.
Don’t know about y’all, but, yes, I’ve heard this rather a lot recently. The fact that Mexican governance is a farcical sham of entrenched corruption, coupled with America’s dumbass “war on drugs,” has led to some rather staggering violence not only on the border, but spilling over into American cities as Mexican drug gangs battle each other, cops and regular citizens for dominance. “90% of their guns came from America” has been a popular talking point among left-wing journalists, more journalists, yet more journalists, politicians, screeching harpies and California Fascists since this started making the news a few months back. And why not? It’s a Scary Statistic that will help them to ram through yet more unConstitutional anti-gun restrictions (a goal that’s not even faintly disguised… many are quite open about it). Small problem: apparently that statistic, like so many thrown about by politicians, is utter rubbish, produced by quote-mining and “data enrichment.”
In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Close to 6,000 were successfully traced — and of those, 90 percent — 5,114 to be exact, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover — were found to have come from the U.S.
But in those same two years, according to the Mexican government, 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes.
In other words, 68 percent of the guns that were recovered were never submitted for tracing. And when you weed out the roughly 6,000 guns that could not be traced from the remaining 32 percent, it means 83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S.
It’s not hard for someone who is either dimwitted or uninterested in facts to squeeze “90% of the guns came from the US” out of that. Sadly, laws are being passed by the dimwitted and those uninterested in facts, at a staggeringly accelerated clip since late January.
And there’s this:
The Mexican government said it has seized 2,239 grenades in the last two years — but those grenades and the rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) are unavailable in U.S. gun shops. The ones used in an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey in October and a TV station in January were made in South Korea. Almost 70 similar grenades were seized in February in the bottom of a truck entering Mexico from Guatemala.
Anybody who thinks that Mexican criminals who are able to get grenades – including RPGs – from non-US sources, but would somehow be stymied for regular firearms if the US suddenly enacted draconian and unConstitutional gun laws… is an idiot.
What an idiot may look like:
