More dead people in Mexico thanks to the Obama Administration’s gun walking scandal… err… sorry… grenade walking scandal. This scandal would have brought down a Republican administration, had something like this happened on their watch. But as it is, it was too easily dismissed as the work of lower-level incompetence.
UPDATE: Just to be clear, the title is sarcastic.
I don’t know if I would call dead Mexicans a gift. Mexico should be issuing an arrest warrant for AG Holder and anyone who was involved in illegally exporting guns to Mexico. Make it so that Holder and the guilty parties can’t leave the U.S. and have to wonder if a future president and DOJ will hand them over.
I meant that sarcastically.
I know that, but the real focus should be on how many Mexican homicides were aided by our AG and the ATF. The number is in the thousands. So what Holder and the ATF did was assist in the deaths of a few thousand innocent Mexicans to try and ram gun control down the throat of America. I really can’t understand why the Nieto administration has not been on the floor of the U.N. General assembly demanding Holder be turned over for some Mexican justice.
Because they don’t have jurisdiction (Holder’s crimes, if any, occurred on US soil, not in Mexico); and the crime for which the administration members would be responsible for is smuggling, basically.
Because the alternative would be for anyone who sells a firearm privately to be responsible for whatever the end user does with it. That is a place I don’t think we want to go.
The issues of jurisdiction is a tricky one. How about the U.S. invasion and prosecution of Manuel Noriega, whose crimes were committed on Panamanian soil? Holder was a conspirator in arming the cartels and illegally exporting firearms to Mexico.
One of the reasons I was less than thrilled by that action. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
“This scandal would have brought down a Republican administration, had something like this happened on their watch.”
Maybe it’s comforting to think that, but I don’t, really. For some reason that I can’t begin to analyze, the whole subject of F&F just failed to get traction with the public, and — IMO — even the media on the right did not seem to communicate any great energy associated with the subject. To me it seemed that only those of us with a genuine interest in gun rights and the BATF — not just an interest arising from a desire to wound the BHO Administration — seemed to care very much. It should have been a story bigger than Benghazi, yet the media on the right has put far more energy into amplifying Benghazi than they ever did with F&F.
Again, that’s just my opinion, and maybe someone with statistics on appearances of keywords or column-inches of interest can prove me wrong. But, that’s how it seems.
At times I wonder if the general public sees something like Fast & furious as not a concern because the guns end up in mexico not the US. Naively the thought is it’s Mexicans that will wind up dead for the most part. That doesn’t make it right. but there are many who just won’t give it much thought. Here in western Washington state, we had Gary Ridgway, who killed a lot of young women, many of whom were working as prostitutes. It took a long time for public outcry to find this guy. If he was seen as a threat to all young women, Maybe he would have been caught sooner.
I blame the USA’s weak grenade laws, particularly those pro-grenade boarder states of Arizona and Texas.
Why yes, the neighborhood kids are always buying them by the caseload from our corner store, it’s an accident waiting to happen.
To be fair, they were talking about smuggling in grenade bodies, which are perfectly legal in the US, and reactivating them in shops.
Which would work, though I don’t know why you’d bother if you were a cartel that could just buy them from the Mexican Army or from Guatemala or such…
Though it’s odd, isn’t it, how “reactivated grenade bodies” are not remotely even close to like a problem inside the US, despite their free availability for decades on end.
Once again I’m going back nearly fifty years for this memory — though maybe things are still done the same way? — but when I was in Infantry Training we had grenade fuses which threaded into the dummy grenade bodies for training. You threaded a fuse in over a little plastic packet of blackpowder, and the dummy was vented so that when it went off, there was a bang and a big puff of white smoke, but no bursting and no shrapnel.
How tightly were/are those fuses controlled? What laws govern their possession? Essentially they were the heart of what would be a deadly explosive weapon.
Clearly, our bomb shows are inadequately regulated.