Habemus plus vis computatoris quam Deus

Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, William Hoover of the BATFE, you fill in the blank, they’re pretty much all singing the same tune ... “90% of the weapons the Mexican drug cartels are committing crimes with come from the United States, O my g0dz0rZ, we must ban teh ebil guns here to save Mexico.”

Only problem is, it’s not true.  Fox just reported the truth, and it’s pretty much what we suspected all along:

What’s true, an ATF spokeswoman told FOXNews.com, in a clarification of the statistic used by her own agency’s assistant director, “is that over 90 percent of the traced firearms originate from the U.S.”

But a large percentage of the guns recovered in Mexico do not get sent back to the U.S. for tracing, because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the U.S.

“Not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the U.S. effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the U.S. market,” Matt Allen, special agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told FOX News.

In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Close to 6,000 were successfully traced -- and of those, 90 percent -- 5,114 to be exact, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover -- were found to have come from the U.S.

But in those same two years, according to the Mexican government, 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes.

In other words, 68 percent of the guns that were recovered were never submitted for tracing.  And when you weed out the roughly 6,000 guns that could not be traced from the remaining 32 percent, it means 83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S.

(Emphasis mine.)

So if not here, then where are the cartels’ guns coming from?

Surprise, surprise:

-- The Black Market.  Mexico is a virtual arms bazaar, with fragmentation grenades from South Korea, AK-47s from China, and shoulder-fired rocket launchers from Spain, Israel and former Soviet bloc manufacturers.

-- Russian crime organizations.  Interpol says Russian Mafia groups such as Poldolskaya and Moscow-based Solntsevskaya are actively trafficking drugs and arms in Mexico.

- South America.  During the late 1990s, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) established a clandestine arms smuggling and drug trafficking partnership with the Tijuana cartel, according to the Federal Research Division report from the Library of Congress.

-- Asia.  According to a 2006 Amnesty International Report, China has provided arms to countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.  Chinese assault weapons and Korean explosives have been recovered in Mexico.

-- The Mexican Army.  More than 150,000 soldiers deserted in the last six years, according to Mexican Congressman Robert Badillo.  Many took their weapons with them, including the standard issue M-16 assault rifle made in Belgium.

-- Guatemala.  U.S. intelligence agencies say traffickers move immigrants, stolen cars, guns and drugs, including most of America’s cocaine, along the porous Mexican-Guatemalan border.  On March 27, La Hora, a Guatemalan newspaper, reported that police seized 500 grenades and a load of AK-47s on the border.  Police say the cache was transported by a Mexican drug cartel operating out of Ixcan, a border town.

Yup, that’s right. Just like I said elsewhere a couple of days ago, the principal sources of the Mexican drug cartels’ weapons are Colombia, the black market, and Mexico itself.  And it should come as little surprise that China’s selling arms to the cartels.  To paraphrase Rule 37, “The enemy of my enemy may not be my friend, but is still my enemy’s enemy.”

But — never forget the mantra of the Obama White House!  “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”  Even when it’s someone else’s.  And the Mexican government is cheerfully complicit:

The exaggeration of United States “responsibility” for the lawlessness in Mexico extends even beyond the “90-percent” falsehood -- and some Second Amendment activists believe it’s designed to promote more restrictive gun-control laws in the U.S.

In a remarkable claim, Auturo Sarukhan, the Mexican ambassador to the U.S., said Mexico seizes 2,000 guns a day from the United States -- 730,000 a year.  That’s a far cry from the official statistic from the Mexican attorney general’s office, which says Mexico seized 29,000 weapons in all of 2007 and 2008.

Yup, you heard it here first — according to Mexico’s ambassador to the US, 503% ... er, excuse my math brainfart, 5,030% of the guns seized by Mexico over the last two years came from the US.

Now, that’s a crisis.  Or, complete and utter bald-faced bullshit.  You decide.

But Tom Diaz, senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, called the “90 percent” issue a red herring and said that it should not detract from the effort to stop gun trafficking into Mexico.

Because one should never let inconvenient facts get in the way of a great piece of propaganda.

(Crossposted to guns)