Intent to Deceive: Bloomberg’s Gun Control Group Repeats the ‘Mexican Gun Canard’
Gun bans in Chicago and Washington, D.C., have been mercilessly struck down by the courts. Concealed carry laws are being adopted and expanded in states across the nation. Shooting sports are increasing in popularity, and gun and ammunition sales remain near record highs. It’s all enough to give the shrinking number of gun control advocates in the United States apoplexy.
It’s also enough to force them into acts of desperation to prop up a failing ideology.
They’ll lie about the demise of one of America’s most widespread rifles, as it soars in popularity. They’ will fabricate research, and fudge facts to do so — including matters of who lived and died. They’ll even go so far as to suggest limiting rights to minorities in a desperate bid to halt the collapse of their cause.
So it should come as little surprise that a new report by Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun organization — Mayors Against Illegal Guns — relies completely upon deception to promote the billionaire mayor’s anti-firearm jihad.
The report, titled “The Movement of Illegal Guns Across the U.S.-Mexico Border,” relies entirely upon statistical dishonesty to support infringing upon U.S. gun rights, starting in the second sentence of the report:
In recent years, the escalating drug cartel violence in Mexico has claimed tens of thousands of lives, fueled in part by thousands of guns illegally trafficked from the United States. In fact, 90% of guns recovered and traced from Mexican crime scenes originated from gun dealers in the United States.
The first sentence of the report is factually correct. Thousands of guns have been smuggled into Mexico by cartels, and theses smuggled firearms have been one source of munitions for the drug gangs.
The second sentence, however, is masterfully deceptive … and purposefully so. You’ll note that it says “90% of guns recovered and traced from Mexican crime scenes originated from gun dealers in the United States.”
Recovered and traced is the hinge for their entire argument. It does not mean that 9 out of 10 guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, though Bloomberg and others clinging to this fallacy would have you believe this.
What it means is that when Mexican authorities recover firearms from a cartel, they try to discern their origins. The vast majority of firearms recovered by Mexican authorities have no ties to the United States in any way, shape, or form. Roughly 80% of guns recovered from the cartels come from other nations, often former Soviet block nations where AK-47s and other automatic weapons can be obtained on the black market for next to nothing, in bulk.
The only firearms handed over to the ATF by the Mexican government are those firearms they have reason to believe came from the United States. These include weapons manufactured in the United States, as well as weapons that bear a U.S. importer’s marks.
The Mexican government provides less than 20% of the weapons they capture for tracing. Of nearly 100,000 weapons recovered from the cartels, only 20 percent had been turned over to the U.S. for identification. Of those, 18,000 were determined to have been manufactured, sold, or imported from the United States. Less than half of that fractional amount could be traced to U.S. gun dealers. The rest were stolen or acquired through other means.
Of 100,000 weapons recovered from the cartels, just 7,900 — less than 8 percent — were traced to purchases from American gun dealers.
Data is still being analyzed, but preliminary reports indicate that in the majority of those sales, it was the customers acting criminally — completing “strawman” purchases where people who pass the FBI’s NCIS background check turn around and provide weapons to the cartels in exchange for pay.
Bob – Thanks for the close analysis. My own reading of Bloomberg is that he is a closet tyrant. When a city goes about banning food additives to save people from themselves, it is essentially saying that people are too stupid to care for themselves. Question to Bloomberg – if people are too stupid to care of themselves, are they too stupid to vote?
The question answers itself, and that begs the next question — why have a republican democracy? Might as well have elites lording it over us stupid people.
As to the gun issue, of course, if Bloomberg believes people are too stupid to take care of themselves, then he must believe they are too stupid to have guns, and so guns must be confiscated and never used in self-defense. Follows logically as night as does the day. Well then, what about criminals who get guns and threaten law-abiding citizens? Oh don’t you worry, the police will protect you (not — please note Baltimore, Detroit and Washington DC, where legal guns are scarce and illegal guns are plentiful, and the homicide rates are stupendous).
As for Mexico, I really don’t care where the cartels are getting their guns. It is up to the Mexican authorities to control the situation (like allowing law-abiding citizens to have their own firearms). For those authorities to complain about the source of the guns is to pass the buck by blaming somebody else for their own failings. (A better complaint would be the current drug prohibition laws in the US, but that’s for another time.)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau would say so, on the grounds that our “individual wills” are corrupt, but that we express the uncorrupted “General Will” in the voting booth. Of course, this leaves unexplained why some of us, after consulting our “General Will” centers, nevertheless vote for the loser. Also, Rousseau produced five illegitimate children and popped them all into orphanages, and then went on to write a book on child-rearing, so he might not be the world’s most trustworthy authority.
I’m shocked I say! Shocked!
Seriously the media and anti-gunners have been lying about us for years, I’ll be more suprised when they tell the truth!
Bloomberg is a horse’s ass with national political ambitions. He’s using gun control to increase his national name recognition. Recall hizzoner’s idiotic “raid” of Virginia gun stores by New York cops that backfired years ago.
In a former life I had a shop in Chelsea with seven or eight employees who came in by subway every day for the Bronx. Every one of them was armed at all times. Knives, razors, guns, slapjacks, and brass knuckles with spikes designed to inflict puncture wounds that wouldn’t close. They were a good-humored crew,hard working and reliable. I know they were honest taxpayers because I deleted their taxes from their paychecks.They said they needed the weapons for protection.
My impression is that if the police stopped a train coming into Manhattan from the Bronx during the morning rush hour and frisked the passengers, they would need a truck to haul away the confiscated weaponry. Do Manhattan subway passengers–those who board the subway once it reaches Manhattan–know how heavily their fellow passengers are armed? Of course not. Middle class Manhattanites might imagine that this or that visibly scruffy fellow might be carrying a knife or a sharpened screwdriver. But the scale and lethality of the armament all around them surely never enters their minds. It would freak them out.
Years ago, Americans were surprised and amused to learn that George Bush Sr. had never been inside a supermarket. The then president-elect was amazed at the use of scanners at the checkout counters. Billionaire Bloomberg has as much experience of guns as George Bush Sr.has of supermarkets.
Gun control is a phoney issue for urban politicians without vision, no connection to the voters and no substantive issues to run on. It plays on the fears of naive city-dwellers; declared environmentalists afraid to set foot in the woods for whom a stock is share in a corporation, a barrel is a receptacle for pickling cucumbers and herring and Trigger is the name of Roy Roger’s dog. All they know about guns is that they ought to be controlled.
Mosques, guns, cigarettes and nutrition–these are the burning issues that keep our Mayor awake at night. Poor fellow is a nervous wreck. Come next election, let’s all do the right thing and send him back to Wall Street where he belongs.
Bloomberg is a horse’s ass with national political ambitions. He’s using gun control to increase his national name recognition. Recall hizzoner’s idiotic “raid” of Virginia gun stores by New York cops that backfired years ago.
In a former life I had a shop in Chelsea with seven or eight employees who came in by subway every day for the Bronx. Every one of them was armed at all times. Knives, razors, guns, slapjacks, and brass knuckles with spikes designed to inflict puncture wounds that wouldn’t close. They were a good-humored crew,hard working and reliable. I know they were honest taxpayers because I deleted their taxes from their paychecks.They said they needed the weapons for protection.
My impression is that if the police stopped a train coming into Manhattan from the Bronx during the morning rush hour and frisked the passengers, they would need a truck to haul away the confiscated weaponry. Do Manhattan subway passengers–those who board the subway once it reaches Manhattan–know how heavily their fellow passengers are armed? Of course not. Middle class Manhattanites might imagine that this or that visibly scruffy fellow might be carrying a knife or a sharpened screwdriver. But the scale and lethality of the armament all around them surely never enters their minds. It would freak them out.
Years ago, Americans were surprised and amused to learn that George Bush Sr. had never been inside a supermarket. The then president-elect was amazed at the use of scanners at the checkout counters. Billionaire Bloomberg has as much experience of guns as George Bush Sr.has of supermarkets.
Gun control is a phoney issue for urban politicians without vision, no connection to the voters and no substantive issues to run on. It plays on the fears of naive city-dwellers; declared environmentalists afraid to set foot in the woods for whom a stock is share in a corporation, a barrel is a receptacle for pickling cucumbers and herring and Trigger is the name of Roy Roger’s dog. All they know about guns is that they ought to be controlled.
Mosques, guns, cigarettes and nutrition–these are the burning issues that keep our Mayor awake at night. Poor fellow is a nervous wreck. Come next election, let’s all do the right thing and send him back to Wall Street where he belongs.
The other thing Bloomberg’s little clique’ conveniently forgets to mention is that one of the major U.S. sources for guns in drug gang hands in Mexico is… the U.S. government.
Last year, the Obama Administration used taxpayers’ money to supply several hundred million dollars’ worth of military-grade small arms and support weapons to the Mexican government, at Calderon’s request, to arm the police. The single most numerous weapon in this transfer was the M4 selective-fire 5.56mm carbine, basically the same weapon used by our troops in the Mideast, a short-barreled version of the M-16.
Within a few weeks of the arms being delivered, about half of those M4s, and other transferred weapons such as M249 SAWs and M60E3 GPMGs, were being used by the drug gangs, having been handed over to them by corrupt police officials. In most cases, the drug gangs were the ones who unpacked the shipping containers.
Bloomberg, Calderon, and The One somehow don’t want to talk about this. I can’t imagine why.
Mexico’s problem isn’t “American guns”.
Mexico’s problem is the same one it has had for about the last couple of millenia, going back to pre-Columbian times under the Inca and Aztecs, continuing under the Spanish, and becoming even worse thereafter.
Namely, a severely damaged culture which operates on principles reminiscent of Italy under the Borgias. Which believes in power in the hands of a few, backed up by the threat of death for anyone who doesn’t fall in line. Which somehow regards the most violent, ruthless, and unstable individuals it can produce as heroes, in or out of government. And which seems to worship violence in general, and dream of spreading it around, less in a quest for power than just to avoid having to feel inferior to other cultures where blood feuds, political corruption, and what amounts to congenital homicidal insanity are not the SOP.
In other words, Mexico’s problem… is Mexico.
Unfortunately, since we have ignored Robert Frost’s axiom that good fences make good neighbors, Mexico is now our problem, too.
clear ether
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Darn, and I was planning on going to the Gun Dealers’ Swap meet on Saturday in Nogales! Or that’s what moron Bloomberg and his ilk would have you believe. It’s amazing the lies fostered by the left to fool the fools, ala, Barack Hussein Obama.
I know a number of people who have discussed taking guns to Mexico for their families, not for use with drug gangs but for self defence. I have to wonder how many of those “drug gun seizures” actually were, and how many were taken from ordinary citizens just trying to stay alive.
“Question to Bloomberg – if people are too stupid to care of themselves, are they too stupid to vote?”
I hate to admit it, but obviously they are — they voted for Bloomberg.
Good job keep calling out Bloomberg. On the topic of guns to Mexico I don’t think we ship enough guns to Mexico. In fact I thing that every illegal alien sent back to Mexico should be given a shotgun and a box of shells. Then he would at least have a chance to defend his family from the cartels and the corrupt government officials. Back to Bloomberg, how can anyone from new York City look anyone in the eye and say I voted for Bloomberg and I’m proud of my vote.
You mean illegal immigrants are taking guns, probably purchased illegaly back to Mexico. Hmmmm, I’m thinking… maybe, we should make the border more secure. Then less illegal immigrants will be coming in, and even more will be caught trying to traffic them back out. I guess only support for radical Islamist is acceptable to bloomy. Radical Mexicans are right out.
Just like the other members of our Elite Ruling Class, Bloomers isn’t talking to those of us aware of the alternate media. He doesn’t count our votes anyway! The dullards believe everything these Ivy League mega-louts tell them.
$113 billion is spent on marijuana every year in the U.S., and because of the federal prohibition *every* dollar of it goes straight into the hands of criminals. Far from preventing people from using marijuana, the prohibition instead creates zero legal supply amid massive and unrelenting demand. The scale of the harm this causes far exceeds any benefit obtained from keeping marijuana illegal.
According to the ONDCP, at least sixty percent of Mexican drug cartel money comes from selling marijuana in the U.S., they protect this revenue by brutally torturing, murdering and dismembering countless innocent people.
If we can STOP people using marijuana then we need to do so NOW, but if we can’t then we must legalize the production and sale of marijuana to adults with after-tax prices set too low for the cartels to match. One way or the other, we have to force the cartels out of the marijuana market and eliminate their highly lucrative marijuana incomes – no business can withstand the loss of sixty percent of its revenue!
To date, the cartels have amassed more than 100,000 “foot soldiers” and operate in 230 U.S. cities, and it’s now believed that the cartels are “morphing into what would be considered an insurgency” (Secretary of State Clinton, 09/09/2010). The longer the cartels are allowed to exploit the prohibition the more powerful they’re going to get and the more our own personal security will be put in jeopardy.
The only canard is the assertion that Mexican officials do not trace guns that have no tie to the US. That has been debunked by factcheck.org and CSIS.
“Correction, April 22: We originally concluded that Obama’s 90 percent figure was “not true” and based on a “badly biased” sample of recovered guns. We are retracting both those characterizations, and we apologize to our readers for this error. We have rewritten the article throughout to correct this.
Our error was to think we had confirmed that Mexican officials submit for tracing only those guns they believe likely to have come from the U.S. Law enforcement officials say they don’t know if that’s the case.”
IN other words the guy who wrote the Fox News article the Mythof 90% was making stuff up and people like you bought it.
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/06/gao-report-us-source-for-large-portion-of-mexican-crime-guns/
http://csis.org/files/publication/101108_Weintraub_MexicanUSAntinarc_web.pdf
See article by Nathan Jones on page 52.
Sure the guns originate in other countries like romania but they got bought by straw purchasers here in the US.
Its not your fault you believed lies. But like factcheck.org you should print a retraction. A Mea Culpa is in order.