State and Defense Departments Arming Mexican Cartels

In the wake of the Project Gunrunner scandal, in which gun store owners were told by the ATF to allow weapons to be purchased and then walked into Mexico illegally, this story takes on added significance. The Department of Defense in conjunction with the State Department, have been selling powerful weapons to Latin American governments as well as to the Mexican government. Once they arrive in the hands of the Mexico government, they seem to disappear and end up in the hands of cartels. In Latin America, they appear to be sold to the cartels of the north.

Yet, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama attempted to push the narrative in 2009 that 90% of the gun crimes in Mexico were the result of weapons being trafficked from the United States. The implication was that tighter gun control was necessary.

Via Fox News:

You can't buy this stuff at a U.S. gun store. So where do the cartels get it? According to leaked diplomatic cables, there are three sources.

1. U.S. Defense Department shipments to Latin America, known and tracked by the U.S. State Department as "foreign military sales."

2. Weapons ordered by the Mexican government, tracked by the State Department as "direct commercial sales."

3. Aging, but plentiful arsenals of military weapon stores in Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

Even though these facts were well-known by the Obama administration, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder, it blamed much of the violence in Mexico on U.S. gun stores.

"More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our border," President Obama said in February 2009.

That was contested, but few listened to gun store owners and former vets like Lynn Kartchner, owner of Allsafe Security, a gun shop in Douglas, Ariz.

"We in the gun industry knew from day one the allegations that the preponderance of sales came from gun stores like this one was totally not true," Kartchner said.

You can debate whether it's bad policy to sell weapons to Mexico and Latin American counties. What is absolutely unacceptable is for a government agency - the ATF - to order gun store owners to sell guns illegally to people who 'walk' those guns into Mexico and then blame those gun store owners for being irresponsible.

This really is an outrage.

Read it all.