This headline comes to us from the Washington Post. When the going gets tough, the tough let the bad guys smuggle thousands of guns into Mexico? Suffice it to say, I just threw up in my mouth a little. But there’s an interesting wrinkle. “The undercover operation’s goal, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich said in a [February 4] letter to Grassley, was ‘to dismantle the entire trafficking organization, not merely to arrest straw purchasers.’ Weich added: ‘The allegation – that ATF ‘sanctioned’ or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported them into Mexico – is false.'” Whoa. Either Weich just threw himself on his sword, or it’s true . . .
Which gives new credibility to the theory that the system was corrupted by cash. Drug money started talking and the guns went walking.
Exhibit B: the WaPo’s revelation about the first event that pinged our Gunwalker radar: the arrest of Carter’s Country gunstore owner for selling weapons enabled by the ATF:
Defense lawyer Dick DeGuerin said the controversy has had an impact on the criminal investigation into one of his clients, Carter’s Country, a Houston area chain that had sold assault weapons to a gun-trafficking ring. DeGuerin said that Carter’s Country was told by the ATF to go ahead with sales of assault weapons and then report the serial numbers later to the ATF. Last week, a prosecutor called DeGuerin to say the investigation was being dropped.
At the time of the indictment, when Carter’s Country’s boss started talking about the ATF’s foreknowledge of illegal sales, I wondered why the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (and Really Big Fires) would prosecute a gun dealer for doing something they told him to do.
The most logical explanation: the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. While I DO believe that the Project Gunrunner and Fast and Furious cover-up reaches all the way to the top, it’s possible that the Agents on the sharp end of all this straw purchasing misegos went rogue.
Just sayin’ . . .
“sophisticated gunrunning rings”
What’s so sophisticated? A bunch of Mexican yahoos with the collective IQ of a shredded chicken taco sashay down to a bunch of gun stores carrying paper bags full of cash and buy up all the rifles. That’s sophisticated? WaPo’s apologia, now that’s sophisticated. One question, though. Wasn’t “Washington Post” the name of an actual newspaper from, like, back in the seventies? I wonder what they’re up to now.
If true, this is what happens when the ATF simply gets too big. Sounds like it needs to be defunded quite a bit to bring it down to size to help the left hand know what the right hand is doing.
I read once that a guy had come up with the perfect job: “Hey guys, this might not be such a great idea” job. Seriously, there wasn’t one person who thought that selling actual guns to bad guys was pretty stupid? I guess if you wake up and decide that narco-states or terrorist organizations are pretty much the same as i.q. 84 holding up the local mini-mart, you end up suggesting really dumb ideas. This wasn’t a Rumsfeldian “unknown unknown”, this was a “known known”, but dealing with it the old fashioned way, i.e General Pershing, was not acceptable in this day and age of “man made disasters”. Another entire department (along with Education and HHS) that can be canceled to reduce the deficit.
I’m sorry but I just don’t buy the “agents went rogue” explanation. Aren’t there internal documents from senior supervisors telling agents to stop complaining about the operation? I may be paranoid but this sounds like the beginning of a “plausible deniability” defense for ATF/DHS/Justice. I suspect when (and if) all the facts become available this will be exactly what it seems like; the ATF knowingly let hundreds of weapons flow into Mexico in the hopes that they would be later confiscated and traced back to dealers in the southern US so that ATF/DHS/Justice would have some justification for demanding long gun registration due to “national security” reasons. Citing “national security” is the only legal way to partially suspend the rights outlined in the 2nd Amendment without having Congress pass a law requiring long gun registration. It’s also the only basis that the Justice Department could use to defend this position before the SCOTUS. In the past, the SCOTUS has granted considerable leeway to the government for reasons of NS.
But that’s just the opinion of one old guy down in Texas!
Makes sense. And I’ve put that theory out there before there was listening to theories. But something still stinks about this. Are we thinking there was no communication between the ATF’s proxies, the drug cartels, back to the proxies, back to the ATF? One way traffic? No money involved?
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