Fast and Furious: Still Covering for the Cover-Up

Bob Owens of Pajamas Media has an excellent critique of a couple of fatuous articles about the Gunwalker or Operation Fast and Furious scandal, charging that these are just more examples of the MSM wishing that the problem would just go away.

The first, by CNN’s Ruben Navarrette Jr, claims that the administration’s attempt to create rifle reporting requirements for dealers in the southern border states is to track the bulk sale of automatic rifles (machine guns).  Owens responds:

Automatic weapons were not among those being trafficked from American gun shops to Mexican cartels.

Not a single one.

They have been heavily regulated since the National Firearms Act of 1934, and in the 77 years since that became the law of the land, machine guns like those you would find in a few specialized gun shops have been used in just two illegal homicides. [emphasis his]

As I've discussed before, (here, here, and here), military firearms used by the cartels tend to come from military sources; none have been found to have come from civilian arms dealers here in the US.

An unsigned editorial in the New York Times continues to repeat the canard that 70 per cent of the firearms recovered in Mexico come from the US (a “blatant fabrication” that has been refuted for some time now in a variety of places, including here).  Owens:

In actuality, 83 percent of guns used by the cartels come from somewhere other than the United States, and of the 17 percent traced to U.S. origins, roughly 8 percent were traced to U.S. gun shops.

Plus, we now know that a substantial portion of the weapons that transited gun shops did so as a direct result of federal law enforcement agencies telling dealers to make questionable sales to suspected cartel gun runners.

A fact the Times conveniently and purposefully ignores.

Owens brings up the continuing problem of the use of the term ‘assault weapon’, which in actuality is an automatic (fires more than one round with one pull of the trigger), individually-carried, military firearm, ergonomically designed to aid in the assault on the enemy or an objective.  This is opposed to the portrayal of an assault weapon by the anti-gun lobby and media (but I repeat myself) as any firearm which, well, looks cool.  In other words, if a rifle looks military to them, then it is an assault weapon, whether it functions that way or not.

The Times editors presumably know little of firearms from firsthand experience, but are certainly intelligent enough to know the practical and academic differences between a military or law enforcement machine gun and a civilian rifle.  They simply choose to conflate the two when it suits [them] . . . they’re more than willing to fabricate when fudging the truth won’t do. . . .

The public is too well-educated, the evidence of probable criminality too blatant and widespread.  The administration’s apparent plan to use gun violence to spur support for gun control efforts has become Watergate with a body count . . .