Posted by Kromey at 7:10pm Feb 24 '11The video's summary does a nice job:
The facts that have come out since Agent Brian Terry was murdered by drug smugglers, however, paint a very different picture. Gun shop owners who wanted to stop sales they thought were suspicious were instead encouraged by the ATF to make the sales. Even more damning, individuals the ATF suspected as being gun runners were not only allowed to purchase more guns, but shop owners were again pressured to make sales they were uncomfortable with.
The idea, from the ATF, was to allow these guns to be trafficked! The more cynical gun rights activists have asserted that this could be a ploy to deliberately inflate the number of weapons being smuggled into Mexico in order to justify stricter gun control here in the US, but whether that's true or not isn't all that important to the family of Agent Brian Terry, murdered in a shootout where at least 2 such weapons were used.
ATF agents who identified these smuggled shipments were ordered to let them go into Mexico; some even begged their superiors to let them stop the guns, but they were ordered to "stand down" and simply watch helplessly as the weapons in criminal hands basically walked into Mexico right in front of them.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives is the agency tasked with enforcing US gun laws, and with keeping guns from being sold to criminals. What a sad state of affairs it is, then, when this same agency simply sits back and watches idly as known traffickers buy large numbers of guns and then "smuggle" (is it really smuggling if the only reason you're not being stopped is because the people who are supposed to stop are letting you do it?) them across the border, where they're then used to support a criminal enterprise thriving on murder and drugs.
By refusing to act when they could, the ATF ultimately bears heavy responsibility for the continued violence in Mexico, and is in fact in the position of effectively supporting organized crime. And they are accessories to every murder committed with those weapons they "let walk", including the murder of Agent Brian Terry.
"Project Gunrunner," an operation run by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, was designed to stop the flow of guns from the U.S. to Mexico's drug cartels, but had the opposite result. Investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports.The bigger context is that some 17% of the guns used by Mexican drug cartels are purchased in the US; the ATF has claimed that they're being bought by so-called "straw purchasers", and thus they need the added authority to require reporting of all sales of multiple semi-auto rifles larger than .22 caliber bought within 5 business days.
The facts that have come out since Agent Brian Terry was murdered by drug smugglers, however, paint a very different picture. Gun shop owners who wanted to stop sales they thought were suspicious were instead encouraged by the ATF to make the sales. Even more damning, individuals the ATF suspected as being gun runners were not only allowed to purchase more guns, but shop owners were again pressured to make sales they were uncomfortable with.
The idea, from the ATF, was to allow these guns to be trafficked! The more cynical gun rights activists have asserted that this could be a ploy to deliberately inflate the number of weapons being smuggled into Mexico in order to justify stricter gun control here in the US, but whether that's true or not isn't all that important to the family of Agent Brian Terry, murdered in a shootout where at least 2 such weapons were used.
ATF agents who identified these smuggled shipments were ordered to let them go into Mexico; some even begged their superiors to let them stop the guns, but they were ordered to "stand down" and simply watch helplessly as the weapons in criminal hands basically walked into Mexico right in front of them.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives is the agency tasked with enforcing US gun laws, and with keeping guns from being sold to criminals. What a sad state of affairs it is, then, when this same agency simply sits back and watches idly as known traffickers buy large numbers of guns and then "smuggle" (is it really smuggling if the only reason you're not being stopped is because the people who are supposed to stop are letting you do it?) them across the border, where they're then used to support a criminal enterprise thriving on murder and drugs.
By refusing to act when they could, the ATF ultimately bears heavy responsibility for the continued violence in Mexico, and is in fact in the position of effectively supporting organized crime. And they are accessories to every murder committed with those weapons they "let walk", including the murder of Agent Brian Terry.
added on 7:16pm Feb 24 '11:
And since I know someone will bring this up, it really isn't 90% as you've probably heard various politicians and officials claim. The actual number is actually around 12% (typo above where I said 17%).