A common deflection by our opponents in the gun rights movement is that we Second Amendment supporters are making a big ado about nothing, considering Fast and Furious only represented a fraction of the overall number of guns trafficked into Mexico unlawfully. Let me take this analogy to another form of crime, and show why the anti-gun groups are phony baloney when they speak about their desire to reduce gun violence (rather than just wanting to reduce gun ownership).
Let’s take this to another form of crime, and to a smaller scale. Let’s talk about a neighborhood that has a problem with home break-ins. The community is small enough that people have a pretty good idea of who the bad apples are, and the local police have worked with the hardware stores in the town to ensure that they don’t crowbars or other burglary tools to the bad apples in town until they solve the rash of home break-ins. The local police catch a few burglars, all of which got in with crow bars, but the burglaries generally continue.
Let’s say that the state police then decide to sweep in, and announcing this is all part of a much bigger burglary ring, not only tell the hardware stores they should sell as many crowbars to the bad apples as they can, but actively encourage them to do so, so that they can infiltrate the ring and bring it down. So the only result is that burglaries in town shoot way up. This raises the question:
- Are the citizens of the town correct to be angry at the state police?
- Would it be paranoid and unreasonable to suggest the state police might have had selfish reasons, like boosting their own budgets, to inflate the crime problem?
- Because burglars still get a hold of crowbars, is it correct to blame the hardware store?
- Is it correct to blame the manufacturer of the crowbar?
- Would you say citizens that are concerned greatly about the police facilitating a rise in crime are just misdirected from the overall problem of burglars getting crowbars? Or the fact that hardware stores sell them?
Smuggling guns to Mexico is illegal. Buying guns from federal dealers to smuggle guns into Mexico is illegal. We expect the police to catch people who are doing it. Aside from disagreements we may have with anti-gunners about mutli-sale reporting requirements, of gun show loopholes, etc — is it not rational and healthy, when the police are found to be facilitating an illegal activity, to apparently no rational end, to be outraged and demand answers? What The Brady Folks, CSGV, and other anti-gun people are disingenuously suggesting, is that because we care about law enforcement not facilitating crime, that means we don’t care about crime. This is a ridiculous leap in logic, even for our opponents. Their reaction to Fast and Furious is further evidence the whole gun violence shtick is just that. If you have a situation where law enforcement is facilitating crime, if you’re interesting in fighting rime, the first order of business is to get the government to stop facilitating crime. Then we can talk about what to do next.
Sebastian, as much as usually agree with you, I too think the whole F&F is mostly a partisan beatup in an election year. I didn’t need Issa to tell me that ATF are bunglers.
It doesn’t help that I can’t stand Issa – IMHO he’s one of the most crooked members of Congress.
Calling it partisan or debating whether Issa is a bum ignores the point- what they did was illegal. They did it to further restrict gun rights.
So I care if Issa’s motives are partisan- what he is doing is still right.
Breaking the law to perform an act that results in the deaths of hundreds of people is just partisan politics. After all, when Bush lied, people died.
I disagree. I think this is a major deal. I also think that the press is downplaying and spinning this in order to make it go away. For that reason, this will have little effect on Obama.
But there is no escaping it: Obama broke the law and caused hundreds of deaths, all so he could advance an antigun agenda. There is no escaping that.
If F&F were mere bungling, you might have a point. Instead, it has all the appearance of an operation specifically designed and intended to inflate the numbers of specific crimes, for the ultimate goal of creating artificial support for gun control.
Holder’s – and now Obama’s – stonewalling simply confirms that they either a) were up to their necks in it, b) knew about it and simply allowed it to continue so they could take advantage of it, or c) were unaware of it until the death of Agent Brian Terry but value their political status more than an honest investigation into a massive criminal enterprise that is arguably also an act of war against a friendly nation. I find “a” to be the most likely, but “b” is certainly possible. I think “c” is extremely unlikely, but if true makes them guilty of felony-level obstruction and subject to impeachment as much as “a” or “b” does.
tl;dr – F&F is probably not incompetence, but even if it were, Obama and Holder’s actions in obstructing the congressional investigation are impeachable in and of themselves.
Had Holder simply handed over the docs to congress, as would be required to fulfill their obligations to congressional oversight demands, this would have been over long before election season. The timing falls on Holder and Obama’s shoulders alone.
the rhetoric that this election year partisan politics has gotten really old! The investigation on F&F started over 18 months ago, and has been dragging on because the of the tactics of the White House! If Holder would turn over the documents requested, it would implicate not only himself, but Hillary Clinton and BO himself! Politics, sure it is, it was a play up to the current U.N. talks on the World Small Arms Treaty that the Clintons have suppoted since Bill was in office. F&F was just one tool of many they wanted to implement this! The Democrats started this battle, they got caught, now they are trying to save their rear ends! thank you!
The power of the virtuous conspiracy theory.
If there was a group of people you trusted, thought were super-smart and completely selfless and dedicated, and they got caught doing something evil and said “it isn’t what it looks like. We have secret stuff going on that’s complicated and we can’t explain right now”, you would be tempted to believe them.
Liberals believe Holder and Obama, that there is some super-secret reason why what happened didn’t really happened or is justified. They believe in virtuous conspiracy theories. Similar theories include household recycling (metal recycling is profitable, paper recycling is heavily subsidized, and plastics recycling is a subsidized waste of money), donating to liberal causes (Peace Through Music, NAMBLA, NARAL, NPR), airport security (it must do some good, right)?
Even though they can’t begin to articulate what good comes from these endeavors, they have faith that somebody somewhere is doing good.
Definitively, the people dumb enough to vote for Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, HRClinton are dumb enough to believe, without even being asked, that Obama and Holder have good reasons for whatever is alleged.
The ends always justify the means in the socialist-leaning mind.
I await the time when the media or someone informs the hispanic voters that the administration that panders to them for their vote was responsible for exporting thousands of deadly assault weapons to Mexican criminals that then slaughtered over 200 Mexican citizens. Oh yes, give ’em, amnesty, but it’s OK to murder, hundreds of brown people below the border. The hypocracy of this obama administration is beyond incredulence.
Obama recently made an executive privelege claim over documents which pertain to the Fast & Furious affair. That alone tells me that Obama was very much involved in Fast & Furious, and that he very much lied to the public about his knowledge of it. Fast & Furious was what Obama was cooking up back with Attorney General Eric Holder when Obama told Sarah Brady that he was “working under the radar” to get new anti-gun laws/semi-automatic bans passed and enacted.
Obama & company all deserve to be impeached for Fast & Furious – it’s their own personal Watergate scandal, but only with piles of corpses involved this time, rather than just a burglary of the opposition party’s home office.
The perversity of the ant-gun crowd is nothing new. Remember how gleeful they were in the late eighties and early nineties every time the homicide rate went up. They would gloat every time a mass shooting occurred. It meant they could get semi-auto restrictions and bans. And if the violence hadn’t abated they might have achieved their holy grail, a total ban on handguns. Most normal people were horrified by the violence of twenty and twenty five years ago but not them, for them it was good news that would help their cause. If Fast and Furious hadn’t been found out but still resulted in a huge body count, they would have been just as happy.
Oh they’re all jumping all over the latest interview w/ Issa which is just making them look even more pathetic in their defense of Holder’s obstructing.
Ash: “I too think the whole F&F is mostly a partisan beatup in an election year.”
Why ‘Fast and Furious’ matters
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/why_fast_and_furious_matters_ufHzotjjbmq4dqaRnnF4JL/1
Ash: “It doesn’t help that I can’t stand Issa”
Then listen to Grassley:
Fast & Furious: History of watchdog work fuels Grassley’s inquiry
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120624/NEWS09/306240031/1007/NEWS05?nclick_check=1
Let me suggest a better analogy: gun crimes committed by legal carriers. They represent a small fraction of the overall violence committed by people with guns, but yet all the solutions are aimed at restricting those lawful owners/carriers.
We don’t need extended analogies, we just need to point out that the same logic used to defend Holder (“it’s a small fraction of the total, so it is therefore insignificant and nothing to cause alarm”) can be used to defend lawful carriers from the few who do bad things (“it’s a small fraction of the total, so it is therefore insignificant and nothing to cause alarm”).
We all see them grasping at straws. I just heard Juan Williams this morning talking F&F. The hypocrisy and spin was so evident I think even he had a hard time swallowing it. But he did – hook, line and sinker.
I was going to say much the same thing: that the Brady Bunch wants to punish lawful users of guns, because a tiny minority want to use them illegally.
Of course, if we were to pursue this analogy, the NRA would have to say “People getting shot is a tiny fraction of all shooting of guns! Most bullets only hit targets! So why are we even investigating these shooters who happen to shoot people? If we were consistent, we’d investigate all shooters, not just people who shoot other people!”
But the NRA doesn’t say this. Instead, the NRA says we need to investigate every shooting that results in the injury of another human, and to punish those who do not act in lawful self-defense. The investigation of Holder is only an extension of the NRA’s stand.
Indeed, one of the NRA’s positions is that we need to enforce the laws we already have. Thus, the NRA’s policy de facto already calls for the investigation of the guns that illegally go to Mexico!