When I heard about this yesterday, I was incredulous:
President Obama used a speech at Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropología – the National Anthropology
Museum – to claim that ‘most of the guns used to commit violence here in Mexico come from the United States.’
‘I think many of you know that in America, our Constitution guarantees our individual right to bear arms,’ Obama said. ‘And as president, I swore an oath to uphold that right, and I always will.’
‘But at the same time, as I’ve said in the United States, I will continue to do everything in my power to pass common-sense reforms that keep guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people.’
‘That can save lives here in Mexico and back home in the United States,’ Obama added. ‘It’s the right thing to do.’
'So we'll keep increasing the pressure on gun traffickers who bring illegal guns into Mexico. We'll keep putting these criminals where they belong: behind bars.'
Museum – to claim that ‘most of the guns used to commit violence here in Mexico come from the United States.’It's ballsy, to say the least, that this guy would in essence blame America for Mexico's violent culture while ignoring his administration's own culpability in the Fast and Furious scandal.
It's glaringly revealing that this report comes not from a stateside media outlet but from abroad.Obama also did not mention the more than 2,000 firearms that his Department of Justice ‘walked’ across the Mexican border as part of Operation Fast and Furious, a federal law enforcement project that aimed to track weapons to drug traffickers.
Those guns have been connected to the deaths of at least 300 Mexican citizens. And U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry died in December 2010 when a so-called ‘Fast and Furious gun’ was recovered at the scene of his murder during a routine patrol in Arizona.
An ensuing Congressional investigation led to the first-ever citation of a sitting cabinet member – Attorney General Eric Holder – for contempt of Congress. Holder declined to provide most of the more than 140,000 documents subpoenaed by a House committee, although the Department of Justice did selectively turn over thousands of others.
The term gun ‘walking’ referred to the administration-approved practice of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) of instructing legal gun dealers to sell firearms to so-called ‘straw buyers’ who intended to pass them on to others.
Once sold, the guns would be ‘walked’ across the U.S.-Mexico border with the permission of federal authorities. While their intention was to follow more than 2,000 guns to their destinations inside the illicit Mexican drug trade, barely one-third of them – principally the weapons used in murders and then discarded at the scene, as is common in Mexico – were ever recovered.
Some gun rights groups have argued that Operation Fast and Furious was intentionally devised as a way to promote gun control, citing emails between senior ATF officials that discussed whether the Fast and Furious guns in one region ‘were all purchased from the same [dealer] and at one time.’
‘We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales,’ one email read.
In another, one ATF leader wrote to another that Fast and Furious ‘could be a strong supporting factor if we can determine how many multiple sales of long guns occurred during the course of this case.’
ATF’s intention, ultimately scrapped under political pressure, was to increase reporting requirements on licensed gun dealers when they sell more than one weapon in a single transaction.
A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment about whether President Obama was referring to Fast and Furious weapons in his speech.
More revealing is that half the country knows not a thing about Obama's blatant hypocrisy.
We are as a country in deep kimchee.
