And the truth shall set you free

FOX News did some investigative journalism on the Mexican Gun Fiasco and managed to find some truth.

It's about time.

The "90% of guns seized from cartels" line that you keep hearing? It's more like 17%.

The article goes on to state that many of the automatic weapons come from over 100,000 Mexican soldiers that left their post and took their guns with them.

"The predominant source of guns in Mexico is Central and South America. You also have Russian, Chinese and Israeli guns. It's estimated that over 100,000 soldiers deserted the army to work for the drug cartels, and that ignores all the police. How many of them took their weapons with them?"

Ed Head, an instructor at Gunsight Academy in Arizona said:

Some guns, he said, "are legitimately shipped to the government of Mexico, by Colt, for example, in the United States. They are approved by the U.S. government for use by the Mexican military service. The guns end up in Mexico that way -- the fully auto versions -- they are not smuggled in across the river."

And there you have it.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Watch the video. Good stuff, huh? The reason most of the weapons such as select fire AK47s seized from the cartels are not traced back to the US is because they don't have serial numbers. How can they be traced without them? US firearms must have a serial number in order to be legally owned and transferred, with the exception of weapons made or imported before 1968. Good luck finding any of those in the US.

Update: AG Eric Holder is now saying that the US is not looking to change gun laws to stop over and under shotguns from being smuggled into Mexico:

Holder said the U.S. is not seeking to change any of its gun laws as part of the effort to curb weapons smuggling.

"I don't think our Second Amendment will stand in the way of what we have begun," he said.

Let's hope he means it.

Update: ABC News is still saying that guns are coming from the US, but tries to change the tone into something subtle that the casual reader will not pick up:

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reports that up to 95 percent of guns seized at scenes of drug violence in Mexico can be traced to U.S. commercial sources. These weapons are increasingly higher-powered, including .50 caliber rifles and armor-piercing ammunition.

So now it's 95%, huh? I would love to know where they got that number from, and why they didn't bother to tell the readers that the weapons were originally sold to the Mexican government.

Update: Damn!! ABC News put out a ton of articles on the Mexican Gun Farce yesterday. This one is the most interesting though:

Try to bring a refrigerator into Mexico in the back of your pickup, and you are almost certain to get stopped by Mexican customs officials.

Stick a couple of AK-47 rifles in your trunk, and chances are you'll whiz right through.

Chances are that if this article was printed on paper it wouldn't be worth letting your dog whiz on. This fantasy crap is somewhere in the vicinity of the "teddy bears are more regulated than guns" fiction that the media loves to spread. But there's more:

North of the border, however, the cartels simply pay straw buyers to pick up weapons at gun shops, gun shows or flea markets, then resell the arms to smugglers.

Perhaps in small amounts, and most of them are handguns. Now, we're getting into the good stuff here, and ABC News uses their single source of information, ATF Agent Tom Mangan, to disseminate the same lies that they have been spreading for at least a year:

"A year ago, we never saw those guns [Barrett .50 cal] going south into Mexico," said Tom Mangan, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "Now we refer to it as one of the weapons of choice."

Did you mention the hundreds, if not thousands of Barrett rifles that were sold to the Mexican army? Of course not. But Associated Press Writer ALEXANDRA OLSON did think it noteworthy to point out this garbage:

And while cartels get most of their high-caliber assault rifles from the U.S., they are turning to Central America for other military-grade weaponry like grenades and even the occasional rocket launcher.

"High caliber" weapons come from the US? Like M16s? The M16s that we sold to the Mexican government so they can outfit the army with them? Sorry, they fire the 5.56x45mm round which is a far cry from "high caliber."

"You're seeing truly military-type guns, like grenade launchers," Mangan said. "They're not coming from the U.S. The hand grenades that are being used, you're looking at that stuff migrating up from Central America."'

Wow! ATF Agent Tom Mangan says something true! Weird. But not so fast:

Experts also agree that the Mexican military, which is often outgunned by traffickers, has not been a significant source of weapons despite the potential for corrupt soldiers to sell out to the cartels.

Many of the cartels' grenades and other heavy weapons could be leftovers from Central America's civil wars, Mangan said.

Just who are these experts? I presume that you actually meant Agent Mangan, since he is the only person you retards seem to be able to get information from and he has no problem being your sock-puppet when you need him to be.

What your "expert" is saying is that the corrupt Mexican government has too big of a heart to sell US made M16s and M203s to the cartels, and that the Mexican soldiers don't bother to keep their issued M60s and M4s when they walk off the job. If I was "outgunned" by the cartels because I only had an M16 or an M60 I probably wouldn't keep it either. Who wants to fight with such inferior hardware anyways. We all know that real narco-terrorists outgun the army and their silly H&K G36s with those AKMSUs.

What do you get when you don't bother to investigate to find the truth, but instead rely on one idiot ATF agent? Junk.

(H/T to Seth)