90% claim debunked ... again

[unixronin]

Yet another debunking of the claim, oft-repeated in Washington, Mexico City and the press, that 90% of Mexican drug gang guns come from the United States.  This time, it's STRATFOR doing the debunking, and they're at least partially using US Government GAO numbers to back their debunking.

The irony is that, as STRATFOR points out, many of the weapons used by the Mexican drug cartels are not even available to the US civilian market in the first place, but are military arms such as M60 machineguns and LAW anti-tank rockets that reached Mexico via Latin American nations such as Guatemala and Nicaragua, to which many of them were supplied (openly or covertly) by the US Government to arm counter-insurgencies or US-backed insurgencies over the past 30-40 years.

Pot, kettle, black.  Mexico is trying to blame the US for its own internal problems, and the Obama administration is enthusiastically going along with it in efforts (aided and abetted by most of the news media) to tar the civilian firearms market, probably in the full knowledge that the US Government's hands are far dirtier in the matter than the US civilian market ever was.

Comments

[vatine]

I guess one could, technically, claim that weapons that went from USG to South America and then further to Mexican drug gangs "come from the uinited States", even if they're not from the 'private sales' sector.

As it happens, my immediate read of "90% of Mexican drug gang guns come from the United States" was that 90% of them were (somehow) coming from USG, either as direct sales or as an unintended consequence of assorted above- or below-board help in the past.