Tag: gun control

Fast & Felonious

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I haven’t said much about the federal government’s “Fast & Furious” program.  Scanning the archives, I think there are only three posts wherein I mention it, and one of them is congratulating David Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh for getting acknowledged as real live authorized journalists for their truly outstanding work in exposing the crimes.  Most of what I’m going to say here is mere repetition of what David and Mike have been reporting all along, but I want some recording of these crimes on this blog.

And it was criminal.

The vast majority of news coverage still calls it a “botched operation” where weapons “slipped across” the border and were “lost,” but the fact is the weapons were intentionally allowed across the border with no expectation of tracking them until they were recovered at crime scenes, and there is evidence that tax dollars paid for at least some of them.

Less mentioned are the allegations that “Fast & Furious” was not an exceptional program, that there were other, similar programs operated out of Texas and Florida, with the Florida operation moving weapons to MS-13 in Honduras called “Operation Castaway.”  Even less mentioned is the allegation that the U.S. State Dept., through its “direct commercial sales” program – the same program that is used to provide weapons and materiel to friendly governments like Mexico – provided military weapons directly to the Zetas cartel with no straw-purchase middlemen whatsoever.

And now it is reported that over the three years of Obama’s first term, “direct commercial sales” to the Mexican government have increased significantly from the Bush era, some ten times greater in 2009 over 2006, and that a significant portion of those weapons have ended up “diverted” into cartel hands.

How significant?

Well “Fast & Furious” was responsible for something on the close order of 2,500 weapons. The (admitted) “direct commercial sales” diversions are on the order of 9,000 weapons.

And the .gov hasn’t released information on how many weapons ostensibly went to the Mexican government through the “direct commercial sales” route in 2010 and so far this year.

In one of the few posts I did on F&F, I quoted an op-ed from the local alt.weekly that postulated:

A high-ranking member of the Sinaloa cartel has testified that his organization received from U.S. and Mexican authorities guarantees of immunity and all the weapons it would need to crush its competitors — an ongoing initiative that’s resulted in an incredible escalation of violence in Mexico over the past few years.

It’s quite possible that “Fast and Furious” was not a sting at all, but was intended to aid the Sinaloans in their efforts to recapture the quieter “good ol’ days” when they enjoyed a virtual monopoly.

And now we have email evidence that the massive multiple-sales of arms to known straw-purchasers by Arizona gun dealers at the encouragement of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives were to be used as an excuse for more gun control regulations.

As one commenter put it,

The more the news reveals about Fast & Furious (& Handgrenades!) the more that I think: Chicago Way. The corruption is so thick you can’t flush enough toilets to get it down to the gulf of Mexico.

In high-level politics, there’s never just one reason anything happens, there are layers.  Heads need to (figuratively) roll over this.  Enough across the border have already done so.  But there need to be many high .gov officials in prison cells over this.

Of course there won’t be.  Just like Rod Blagojevich won’t spend 14 years in prison.  After November, 2012, I doubt you’ll hear another peep about Fast & Furious from the legacy media.  It’ll be as though it never happened.  Eric Holder might – might – not be Attorney General, but that’s the most that will happen.

Authorized Journalists

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David Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh, that is.  At least according to my hometown newspaper, the Brevard Times.  (I grew up in Brevard Country, Florida.)

In January 2011, journalists David Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh picked up the Gunwalker story from CleanUpATF.org. They began to investigate and report their findings as well as precipitate a Senate Judiciary Committee inquiry into the matter led by U.S. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA). Codrea and Vanderboegh have zealously attempted to publicize the issue ever since. Their hard work finally paid off – Fox News briefly began to report the story while CBS began a full length investigation which aired last month. Just yesterday, CBS reported that the National Rifle Association used its annual convention to highlight the Gunwalker scandal.

And there’s this:

…President Obama’s claim that 90% of guns recovered from Mexico originated from the U.S. Obama’s 90% statistic drew criticism from media outlets such as Fox News and PolitiFact in April 2009 that his claims were not true and unsubstantiated.


So did the Obama administration hatch a plan to create evidence by using the A.T.F. to enable U.S. gun shipments to Mexico beginning in November 2009 in order to back up his 90% claim made just seven months earlier? It is quite possible that we will find out that answer as the Senate investigation proceeds.

So now we have official acknowledgement from the MSM that bloggers can be journalists.

And it’s interesting to see even a small MSM outlet ask the question, “Was Fast and Furious botched, or was it intentional?”

Codrea and Vanderboegh: The Woodward and Bernstein of the Twenty-first Century!

Interesting Data Point

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I picked up the current issue of Tucson’s alt.weekly, and ran across an opinion piece concerning a local artist whose subject matter is the border and narcotics trafficking.  Near the bottom of the piece was this, however – and bear in mind, this is the local lefty rag:

Consider the scandal du jour, the “Fast and Furious” sting operation in which U.S. agencies secretly facilitated the purchase and transmittal of thousands of weapons from U.S. gun dealers to Mexican drug cartels. It may seem like an isolated instance of bad judgment, corruption or incompetence, but it’s really a perfectly logical dynamic of a vast industry that annually generates somewhere between $350 billion and $500 billion—a massive, global current of cash that actually kept some banks afloat during the 2008 financial crisis.

A high-ranking member of the Sinaloa cartel has testified that his organization received from U.S. and Mexican authorities guarantees of immunity and all the weapons it would need to crush its competitors—an ongoing initiative that’s resulted in an incredible escalation of violence in Mexico over the past few years.

It’s quite possible that “Fast and Furious” was not a sting at all, but was intended to aid the Sinaloans in their efforts to recapture the quieter “good ol’ days” when they enjoyed a virtual monopoly.

(Emphasis in original.)  Hmmm.  When even your team isn’t covering for you anymore….

We’re Winning

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Say Uncle links to a story involving a home invasion thwarted by a resident with an AR-15.  From the comments:

I love this town. A shooting results in an argument over the proper shot size for perps. – “Southrider”

—

There are actually many Democrats that support gun rights. The NRA grades each Congressional candidate based on their gun rights voting history. There are many Democrats with a B or better. I am surprised, though, that no one from the anti-gun establishment has commented. – “Sphereo”

I’m not. They’ve mostly taken their ball and gone home.

Gun Ownership Up in England & Wales

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At least that’s what they’re reporting.

Gun ownership is always thought of as a rarity in the UK. We may like to think that this country has lower levels of gun crime than the US, and that we don’t have the same problems of US gun control – especially after the Tucson shooting last year.

Forgotten Derrick Bird so soon?

But there are still plenty of firearms around here, all held legally. These latest figures from the Home Office have just been released and they show that more guns have been licensed than ever before.

How many?

• There were 141,775 firearm certificates on issue on 31 March 2010, an increase of 2% compared with the end of March 2009
• 580,653 shotgun certificates were on issue on 31 March 2010, 1% up
• Those certificates cover a total of 1.8m guns

This is exclusively England and Wales.  It does not include Scotland nor Northern Ireland.

So we have a grand total of 722,428 licenses covering 1.8 million rifles and shotguns.  Surely there is a large overlap between the group of people who possess firearm certificates (rifles and certain shotguns) and shotgun certificates (single- and double-barreled shotguns only), so the total number of individuals possessing licenses is going to be well under 722,000. 

The article states that the ratio is about 3,323 shotguns and rifles combined per 100,000 population, and that much is true, but what’s the license ratio?  The population of England and Wales is a bit over 62 55 million (correction pointed out by James Kelly, mea culpa), meaning that perhaps one in eighty-five seventy-six people is licensed to have a firearm of any kind.

I can’t help but recall the words of St. George Tucker from his 1803 Blackstone’s Commentaries on American law:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep,(sic) and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty …. The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.

Well, I guess they can count themselves lucky that they’re doing better than one in five hundred.

Legally.

The estimate on illegally possessed firearms?  Well, in 2000 the Sunday Times reported:

UP TO 3m illegal guns are in circulation in Britain, leading to a rise in drive-by shootings and gangland-style executions, new figures have revealed.

That dwarfs the 1.8 million currently legally owned, doesn’t it?  And in 2008 The Guardian reported:

The gun shown here, a Webley, is up for sale in London for £150, one of hundreds of such weapons that are easily and cheaply available on the streets of the UK’s big cities, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

The variety of weapons on offer in Britain is extensive and includes machine guns and shotguns, as well as pistols and converted replicas. A source close to the trade in illegal weapons contacted by the Guardian listed a menu of firearms that are available on the streets of the capital.

“You can get a clean [unused] 9mm automatic for £1,500, a Glock for a couple of grand and you can even make an order for a couple of MAC-10s,” he said. “Or you can get a little sawn-off for £150. They’re easy enough to get hold of. You’ll find one in any poverty area, every estate in London, and it’s even easier in Manchester, where there are areas where the police don’t go.

“People who use shotguns tend to be lower down the pecking order. There is less use of sawn-off or full length shotguns, and if a criminal wants street cred, he wants a self-loading pistol, a MAC-10 or an Uzi submachine gun.”

—

But it is the arrival of eastern European weapons that, alongside a homegrown industry in converting them, has contributed to the firearms glut. “There has been an influx from eastern Europe and particularly from Poland, and there are also a lot coming in from people who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq,” said the source. “In Liverpool docks, you can put in an order for 10 guns and some grenades and they’ll say OK and two weeks later, they will be there – and they are straight goers.”

Grenades!

There have been grenade attacks in the UK.  In 2003 a 63 year-old woman lost a leg when a grenade was tossed into her Liverpool home, for example.

But if this information is even close to accurate, it means that you have a greater chance of meeting someone who possesses a firearm illegally  in Britain than someone who possesses a firearm legally.

And the person who possesses one illegally is far more likely to stick it in your face by way of letting you know.  So you can hopefully forgive me when I dismiss the idea that the UK’s “strictest gun laws in the world” has done much of anything to disarm its criminal element or prevent spree-shootings.

From Where Great Britain Used to Be

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How’s that gun control working out again?

Terrifying arsenal of weapons found in teaching assistant’s Newall Green home

Terrifying. Their word. Another Glock 18?  No. 

The weapons – described by police as some of the most destructive they have ever seized – were linked to a series of shootings in Manchester and the north west, including one incident where a bullet narrowly missed a baby.

In a raid at the house in Burbage Road, Newall Green, police found a frightening array of firearms and ammunition, including two 9mm pistols, a 12-bore shotgun for use in combat, a Skorpion sub-machine gun, and lethal hollow-point and soft-tip bullets.

Terrifying or frightening?  Make your mind up.  There’s about an order of magnitude difference.  And you know, not one of those is legal to possess in the UK. Let’s see:

A compact Glock. Must’ve purchased that at an American gun show.

That’s a “Tariq 9mm believed to have been smuggled from Iraq” that “has been linked to three shootings in Greater Manchester, including a 2009 incident where a bullet narrowly missed a sleeping baby.” Wow. Don’t they know that handguns are illegal in the UK?

That’s your generic 12 gauge semi-auto short-barreled shotgun. I can’t tell from the photo make or model, but quite effective.  Benelli, maybe? And with the extended magazine tube, quite illegal. Not that it matters, obviously.

The pièce de résistance:

A Czech Skorpion submachinegun, probably chambered in .32ACP, but it might be .380. With one magazine.  That’s unpossible! Full-auto weapons have been banned in the UK since 1937!

Four guns. Four guns described as a “terrifying arsenal.” Kinda reminds me of Tams snark:

It’s good to have goals. Mine is that, when they finally come after me for felony jaywalking or confuse my address with the crack house two blocks down, and in the aftermath spread all my stuff on bedsheets in the front yard, I want the kids on the intarw3bz gun boards to look at that junk-on-the-bunk display and say “Wow, that is an arsenal.”

If they saw what I have in my safe, they’d wet themselves. And I don’t own anything full-auto.  I haven’t seen it, but I doubt my collection is but a shadow of hers.  She probably owns more Smith & Wesson revolvers than I own guns.

It’s a Twofer!

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So (formerly) Great Britain has “some of the toughest gun laws in the world,” according to former Home Secretary Alun Michael, gun laws that were necessary because (he said) “We recognize that only the strictest control of firearms will protect the public.”

They tell us that getting groped and probed and scanned by the TSA is necessary too, and for the same reason – “protecting the public.”

Oh really?

So much for airport security: Man ‘smuggled 80 guns into Britain’ by hiding them in suitcases


An American man is suspected of smuggling 80 weapons into the UK by hiding them in his suitcases.

Former U.S. marine Steven Greenoe, who holds British citizenship, apparently strolled through airport security in both Britain and America with dozens of handguns stashed in his suitcases on ten flights last year.

He is believed to have delivered them to criminal contacts in the North West of England.

On one occasion, Greenoe was stopped after officials at Atlanta airport spotted the firearms.

But incredibly he was allowed to board the flight after telling officials he worked as an international security consultant.

The revelations are an embarrassment for transatlantic security and for the UK Border Agency.  (Ya THINK?)

It makes a mockery of security regulations which mean innocent passengers have to carry cosmetics in clear plastic bags when in fact Greenoe apparently had no problems carrying weapons in a suitcase.  (Those regulations were already a mockery.  Now they’re a belly-laugh.)

So… did Project Fast and Furious expand to include Jolly Olde England?  Is Greenoe a BATF employee, on or off the books? 

Oh, and get this:

A number of 9mm semi-automatic pistols believed to have been bought by Mr Greenoe for $500 each in a North Carolina gunshop were offered for sale at up to £5,000 a piece in Britain a week later, according to the Times.


More than 60 weapons, including more than 20 Glock pistols and more than a dozen Ruger handguns, are understood to be still unaccounted for.

Wow! At current exchange rates, that’s an $8200 return on a $500 investment (minus, of course, the plane fare.) Still, you’re looking at close to a 16:1 ROI if you can move five at a time, and he’s moved at least 60 guns that they know about. At a guess, we’re talking $400k worth of profit.

I am once again reminded of Father Guido Sarducci’s Five-Minute University Economics class: “Supply and-a Demand. That’s it.”

Apparently no one in Britain’s gun-control culture has taken that one.

Quote of the Day – Originalism Edition

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One of the most remarkable features of Justice Scalia’s majority opinion and Justice Stevens’s dissent (joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter) is the view that the Second Amendment means only what it meant at the time of its proposal and ratification in 1789-91. — Sanford Levinson, Huffington Post, D.C. v. Heller: A Dismaying Performance by the Supreme Court

No, they tried to define what it meant at the time of its proposal and ratification – “original public understanding.”  And Scalia was far more correct than Stevens, which Sandy Levinson didn’t bother to point out.  I thought Stevens’ errors were the most remarkable feature of his dissent.