ATF Agent [Not Shown]: “We’ve probably allowed more guns into the country than guns we’ve stopped”

Before the Gunwalker scandal broke big, gun control advocates were busy championing the ATF. Hey why not? The Republican’s Tea Party-led, NRA-endorsed sweep to power left the gun grabbers (sorry Dan) up legislative creek without a pistol-preventing paddle. The U.S. Supreme Court had dashed their hopes of protecting restrictive restrictions (e.g. Mayor Daley’s handgun ban). The fundamentally gun-aversive Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was their last redoubt. The Washington Post’s shameless shilling for ATF funding—in exchange for access to “secret” trace data for a Pulitzer Prize run—represented the high water mark in that particular campaign. With new revelations about the ATF gun smuggling operations hitting the net on a daily basis, the low point has yet to arrive . . .

Meanwhile, the silence from our friends in the gun control community about Gunwalker is deafening. Why’s that then? Aren’t these the same people who decry criminal access to firearms? You know; gun show loopholes, terrorist loopholes and permit-less (a.k.a., Constitutional) carry. The ATF has supplied criminals with ASSAULT RIFLES. Hello?

Why isn’t The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the Violence Policy Center and the Mayors Against Illegal Guns screaming bloody murder—for that is what it is—about the ATF’s lax firearms accounting (to say the least)?

Is it because two federal agents were killed by thugs using guns enabled by the ATF rather than, say, a Democratic congresswoman? Is it because gun control advocates don’t give a shit about the hundreds of average Mexicans staring down the barrel of these ATF-enabled rifles and handguns?

Or is it because beggars can’t be choosers? Without public support for their agenda, without a legal basis to pursue it, without a gun aversive federal agency to sneak it in via regulations, they’re SOL. And they know it.

So the anti-gun brigades are laying low. Waiting for the smoke to clear. Ready to pronounce that the ATF’s heart was in the right place. Right goal, wrong means. All the ATF needs is a bit of tidying-up and more money, and they’re back in the fight. Bring on the long gun registry!

The Washington Post is still playing the sympathy card for President Obama and his now-beleaguered ATF, pretending that they don’t know that the whole “Iron River” meme is a meaningless morass of misleading misinformation. That the vast majority of Mexican drug cartels’ weapons are coming from “official” sources.

As you’d expect, the left-leaning, anti-gun LA Times is in lockstep with this pro-ATF apologist position. But somewhere in the dim recesses of the paper’s subconscious mind, the paper remembers that it is a journalistic enterprise. The desire to bite off a chunk of the Gunwalker scandal has awakened that primal urge.

U.S. authorities in Mexico charged with stemming the flow of U.S. weapons to drug cartels have been hampered by shortfalls in staffing, agents with limited Spanish skills and the difficulty of recruiting new agents to the dangerous posting because they can’t officially carry weapons, current and former staff members say.

See? Forget corruption and criminally culpable incompetence. As the old typewriter ad said (college parents buy son a typewriter so they can read his letters home): Please. Send. Money. Ah, but the dickheads are in the details.

Jaquez said ATF field offices in Mexico were so short-staffed that agents were either forced to spend most of their time on paperwork or didn’t have necessary backup to safely do street work.

“It was one meeting after another. At the end of the week, you ask, ‘What did I do?’ And ultimately the question has to be asked, OK, ATF has put all this money into Mexico, what have we done? How many guns have we stopped from coming into the country? Well, this whole scandal shows we’ve probably allowed more guns into the country than guns we’ve stopped,” Jaquez said.

“The next question is: How many people have gone to jail compared to three years ago, when we had only three people there? The answer is none. There is no difference,” he said. “We have no prosecutions that have resulted from us being in Mexico City.”

Never mind the funding; I kinda get the feeling that the ATF couldn’t give a shit about the drug lords’ arsenal, or what they do with it. Once American guns are south of the border, fuck ’em. The only reason the Agency is crying into its beer now: U.S. law enforcement agents paid the price for the ATF’s woefully misguided Operation Fast and Furious. Oops!

As for the mainstream media’s take on the Gunwalker scandal, all I can say is thank god for David Codrea and the Sipsey Street Irregulars and yes CBS for seeing through the BS put out by those who don’t understand thing one about the Second Amendment or, indeed, the Mexican people.

I leave you with this, a reprise of the WaPo’s “the ATF as victim” lament as sung by the LA Times.

Several agents said the bigger problem was not in Mexico, but shortfalls in staffing and gun laws in the U.S., which had prevented the ATF from adequately monitoring multiple sales of semiautomatic rifles to suspicious buyers.

“We have roughly the same amount of people we had when they founded us in 1972,” one agent said.

He said Congress and the Obama administration had refused to support the ATF’s proposal to require federally licensed gun sellers to report multiple sales of long-barreled rifles, as they were with handguns, to a single buyer.

“Can someone tell me how I can find out if Joe Blow just bought 50 guns at a gun store? If they do, I’ll be happy to sit outside the door and ask him why he bought them. But otherwise, I won’t know until they start showing up at crime scenes,” the agent said.

You might want to check the ATF’s records of guns that they helped buy for that one, bub.