Why We Shouldn’t Trust The Mexican Government (Or Ours) When It Comes to American Gun Smugglers

This summer, the Mexican government convinced the Obama Administration and its camp followers that Mexican drug cartels relied upon assault rifles purchased at American gun shops and smuggled across the border. Thanks to “Gringo guilt” and a superflous federal agency hungry for something to justify their existence, the ATF now plans on creating an “emergency”American long gun registry to monitor multiple rifle sales. This initiative is based entirely upon firearms trace data submitted by Mexican law enforcement to the ATF—which tells us nothing about the weapons that form the majority of the drug lords’s arsenals. More to the point, Mexico is profoundly corrupt. We can’t trust anything they tell us about the drug cartels’ arsenal, which includes a large supply of grenades (currently unavailable at Bob’s Gun Shop). Here’s a rare example of Mexican disinformation revealed . . .

Joseph Proctor told his girlfriend he was popping out to the convenience store in the quiet Mexican beach town where the couple had just moved, intending to start a new life.

The next morning, the 32-year-old New York native was dead inside his crashed van on a road outside Acapulco. He had multiple bullet wounds. An AR-15 rifle lay in his hands.

His distraught girlfriend, Liliana Gil Vargas, was summoned to police headquarters, where she was told Proctor had died in a gunbattle with an army patrol. They claimed Proctor — whose green van had a for-sale sign and his cell phone number spray-painted on the windows — had attacked the troops. They showed her the gun.

Needless to say, no. As the AP report reveals, at the risk of her own life, Proctor’s mother uncovered the truth.

His mother, Donna Proctor, devastated and incredulous, has been fighting through Mexico’s secretive military justice system ever since to learn what really happened on the night of Aug. 22.

It took weeks of pressuring U.S. diplomats and congressmen for help, but she finally got an answer, which she shared with The Associated Press.

Three soldiers have been charged with killing her son. Two have been charged with planting the assault rifle in his hands and claiming falsely that he fired first, according to a Mexican Defense Department document sent to her through the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City . . .

“I hate the fact that he died alone and in pain an in such an unjust way,” Donna Proctor, a Queens court bailiff, said in a telephone interview with the AP. “I want him to be remembered as a hardworking person. He would never pick up a gun and shoot someone.”

But let’s say Proctor had been Mexican and did want to shoot someone who was, I dunno, trying to kill him. Guess who controls all of Mexico’s legal firearms sales? The military. Do you think they want armed civilians in the mix of murder and mayhem that they face and, as we see here, create and then cover-up?

Truth be told, a large percentage of illegal civilian firearms are smuggled in from America. How many? No one knows. Perhaps the right answer is “not enough.” If so, the ATF crackdown on multiple rifle sales north of the border could be leading to the deaths of innocent Mexican civilians.

Bottom line: the Mexican drug wars are a battle between cash-rich and ruthless drug cartels and a federal government that answers to the same description. The ATF’s efforts to keep the Mexican populace disarmed, as self-righteously unintentional as they may be, help both sides.

But here’s the thing: by blaming American drug consumption and presumtive gun running for fueling the war, by painting their efforts as a simple battle between good and evil, the Mexican government deflects attention away from the political and military corruption which make the war worse. The Mexican power structure will say anything to further that goal.

Nor should we trust the ATF, a profoundly anti-Second Amendment agency with a chip on its shoulder the size of Montana. When ATF Acting Director Andrew Melson claims that the ATF’s new “emergency” long-gun registration is OK because “working together we can [fight gunrunning] without infringing on the rights of law abiding Americans,” he is not to be be;ieved.

Those who do not learn from history are condemned to hear that adage from bloggers with long memories and easy access to Google:

In the late ’70s, shortly after my late father, Neal Knox, took over the NRA’s lobbying efforts, ATF leaders attempted to expand their power by implementing a regulatory scheme requiring that gun manufacturers add a government-defined 13-digit serial number to every gun and that dealers report detailed information, including that new serial number, to ATF for every sale. Records of those sales, guns, and purchasers were to be stored in ATF computers. It was gun registration, pure and simple. The scheme might have slipped through had it not been for the heightened visibility of ATF due to Dad’s efforts and his immediate sounding of the alarm when the proposal was introduced.

Congress had upon numerous occasions debated the idea of a federal gun registration law and had rejected the idea on each occasion. For ATF to decide to bypass Congress and implement such a registration scheme via regulation was rightly perceived as an affront by many members of Congress, and their indignant response was to remove some four million dollars from the agency’s operating budget (the amount ATF said they expected to spend on the scheme.)

That overreach, along with egregious abuses of honest gun dealers by the ATF led to the introduction of the McClure-Volkmer Firearms Owners Protection Act to repeal some of the more onerous and confusing sections of the Gun Control Act of 1968.

As wnd.com‘s Jeff Knox says, the people (yes, the NRA are people too) have spoken on this issue. Many times. Clearly. And now it’s time for them to speak again.

The Mexican drug wars suck. We should do what we can to stop them (step AWAY from that joint). But Americans should not sacrifice their freedoms—even for a year—on the word of the Mexican or American governments. And we must tell our government employees that we will not tolerate this egregious overreach. As Mr. Knox says, “there is no such thing as a reasonable infringement on liberty.” Here’s how to make your voice heard.

1. Call the Office of Management and Budget, Office of Information and Regulation Affairs, Department of Justice, desk officer at (202) 395-6466
2. E-mail Barbara A. Terrell, ATF, Firearms Industry Programs Branch at [email protected]
3. Call your senators and representative through the United States Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121