Even if we assume the Obama administration places no value whatsoever on human life, it’s hard to see how the gun-control scheme would have passed a cost-benefit analysis.
First, the benefits are negligible. The Obama administration and its accomplices in the media have already been more than willing to twist statistics in order to claim that most guns involved in Mexican drug violence come from the U.S. Content with their falsehood, why would they need to inflate the real numbers to back it up?
Moreover, if the goal was to increase the overall use of U.S. guns in Mexican crimes, Fast and Furious wasn’t nearly large enough: In most years, more than 10,000 guns used in Mexican crimes are traced to U.S. sources. Fast and Furious let somewhere in the vicinity of 2,000 guns go, but it will take years for them to be recovered at crime scenes, and some never will be.
And if the goal was simply to accumulate anecdotes about American guns that were used by Mexican criminals, it’s not clear why the Justice Department would need a richer source than the 10,000 weapons that are traced to the U.S. each year without Fast and Furious.
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