New e-mails: ATF officials discussed using Fast & Furious to … push gun control

Demand Letter 3 was to be much more sweeping, affecting 8,500 firearms dealers in four southwest border states: Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. ATF chose those states because they “have a significant number of crime guns traced back to them from Mexico.” The reporting requirements were to apply if a gun dealer sells two or more long guns to a single person within five business days, and only if the guns are semi-automatic, greater than .22 caliber and can be fitted with a detachable magazine.

There’s a big lie in there somewhere. Such guns are legally deemed “assault weapons” in California and cannot be sold to civilians. So why would the ATF order California gun stores to report gun sales that are already outlawed and not taking place? Something doesn’t add up.

Socratease on December 7, 2011 at 4:39 PM

“Ninety percent of all weapons we are seizing in Mexico, Bob, are coming from across the United States,” he said, citing the high number of Federal firearms licenses a few miles north of the border.

That’s a lie.

Congressman Connie Mack (R-Fla.), however, challenged Rand’s claim that 90% of guns seized from the cartels are from the United States. Rand cited the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) for her claim. But the BATFE has only stated that 90% of the guns traced are from America. BATFE only traces a fraction of the guns seized; those firearms are not selected randomly, but are likely selected because they are the guns most likely to have come from the U.S. Trace data reveals nothing about the large number of guns that are not traced.

And:

(CBS News) Selling weapons to Mexico – where cartel violence is out of control – is controversial because so many guns fall into the wrong hands due to incompetence and corruption. The Mexican military recently reported nearly 9,000 police weapons “missing.”

Yet the U.S. has approved the sale of more guns to Mexico in recent years than ever before through a program called “direct commercial sales.” It’s a program that some say is worse than the highly-criticized “Fast and Furious” gunrunning scandal, where U.S. agents allowed thousands of weapons to pass from the U.S. to Mexican drug cartels.

“There is a direct correlation between the expiration of the assault weapons ban and our seizures of assault weapons,” he argued.

Well, DUH! If you ban red cars then you’ll see a decrease in the number of red cars involved in fatal accidents. A correlation can be perfectly true and yet perfectly useless. The real question is whether or not the federal assault weapon ban had any effect on rates of criminal violence in Mexico. We know from our own Justice Department survey that it had no detectable effect on ours.

Socratease on December 7, 2011 at 4:49 PM