Calderon And Daley Want Your Guns
Not happy with interfering in our internal affairs by savaging Arizona’s new immigration law, the president of Mexico wants to shred our Second Amendment too. And the mayor of Chicago wants to help.
There stood Mexican President Felipe Calderon before Congress, blaming America for the violence on his side of the border and, among other things, the guns that fuel the Mexican drug war that has claimed more than 23,000 Mexican lives since he took office in 2006. Rather than taking responsibility himself, he shoved the blame on America.
It would all stop, he implied, if America would reinstate a ban on semiautomatic weapons. The violence in Mexico, he said, “coincides, at least, with the lifting of the assault weapons ban in 2004.”
He repeated the canard that in the past three years Mexican authorities have seized some 75,000 weapons, more than 80% of them traceable to the United States. Rubbish on both counts.
First, Mexico sends only about one-third of its confiscated weapons to the U.S. for tracing. Of that third, many can’t be traced at all due to efforts to remove registration markings.
Fox News reported last year that according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico sent about 11,000 guns in 2007-08 to the U.S. for tracing. Of that number, 6,000 were successfully traced. And of that 6,000, only 5,114, or the famous 80%, were found to have originated in the U.S.
Do the math and you find that only 17% of the guns confiscated were actually traced to the U.S. So why are so few guns sent here for tracing? Because, as Matt Allen, a special agent with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, points out, weapons known not to be of American origin are not sent to the U.S. for tracing.
Ed Head, a firearms instructor in Arizona who spent 24 years with the U.S. Border Patrol, recently displayed an array of weapons considered “assault rifles” that are similar to those recovered in Mexico but are unavailable for sale in the U.S.
“These kinds of guns — the auto versions of these guns — they are not coming from El Paso,” Head told Fox News. “They are coming from other sources. They are brought in from Guatemala. They are brought in from places like China. They are being diverted from the military. But you don’t get these guns from the U.S.”
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