It did affect me, it doesn’t now though. Basically NRA is just a bunch of FUDDs who thinks current gun control laws now are reasonable. So every administration can literally pass what they like and NRA will just accept it.
Are you permanently banned from the U.S.?
yes
So I guess that means it’s still affecting you, right?
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WTF.
Is this for real? Why would they even do that? I don’t really want to spend $15 on the book, but I’m curious what the motive was. Was it just some rogue ATF agents involved in drugs, or was it part of a bigger plan to ruin Mexico?
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I have no idea but I suspect there are money to be made in enforcement actions, prison, etc. that would make conservative bible thumpers jizz their pants.
That and I suspect the US is pretty active in its destabilization of Latin America.
Did you even read the article? Yes, it was real. The motivation was that Obama wanted to push for more gun control, and was going to use “American-made guns are fueling Mexican cartel violence!” as the excuse. It wasn’t “rogue ATF agents”, it was ordered by Obama and implemented by Eric Holder, his top man at DOJ.
What Obama and Holder didn’t count on was that BATFE agents would actually turn into whistleblowers and throw the curtain back on their plans. The murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was probably the catalyst for that; the gun used to kill him turned out to be one of the guns that had been sold to the cartels through the program.
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You could have stopped there, or even before that.
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Ah, sorry, I read down to the bottom and the link had scrolled off the screen. So I forgot it was there.
I’m old, OK? Don’t judge me.
Even so, the article doesn’t really shed any light on what was going on. The purported explanation - that Obama wanted a cartload of American guns to be identified in Mexico so that he could (a) justify his own statistics and (b) push for gun-control laws - seems highly implausible. Firstly, the public already have the impression that most illegal guns in Mexico come from the US, and they don’t really care that much - so why bother proving it? Secondly, most Americans are aware that Mexico’s problems run far deeper than a ready supply of weapons, so again, they would be unlikely to support domestic gun controls on that basis.
There must surely be more to it than that. It’d be an awfully high-stakes game to play for such a low probability of payback.
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Or just plain incompetence.
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I dunno. Intentionally setting up a programme to leak 650 guns across the Mexican border doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that arises from incompetence.
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It does if you have grand ideas that are, well, founded in ideological incompetences. It’s America dude, we do it all the time. Bipolar nation.
As far as I can tell from 5 minutes googling:
This plan was real.
The idea was to follow the guns purchased by small straw men, which would hopefully lead to arrests of bigger arms smugglers or even, ultimately, big cartel people. The motivation was that most gun related indications were against small guys, while the big guys were not caught.
It didn’t work out as planned, and actually armed the targeted people instead of getting them into jail: lots of the involved guns were not recovered.
On the other hand, I wonder how the scale of these fuckups compares to genuine, unrelated gun trafficking. The quote “the Obama administration, not the NRA, armed the cartels!!!” sounds to me like mayyyybe it could be a tiiiiiny bit overblown 
and the purported motivation sounds a bit made-up.
Ugh, American politics are fugly. Well… I guess all politics are.
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Yes, I gathered that from the article, but it seems to me that the ATF guys put a very small amount of effort (one might say suspiciously small) into actually following the guns to see where they went. Or thinking about how they might actually do that … or whether it was even possible. You’d think they would at least have put radio beacons in the guns being sold to known criminals.
Sure, there must be thousands of US guns flooding into Mexico and 650 more is probably a drop in the ocean. I’m just wondering if, perhaps, many of the others are somehow permitted to happen. It’s been a funny old year, full of stuff I would never have believed was possible.
The cartels steal all the guns they want from the Mexican military, when they aren’t importing directly from China.
Well pardon me all to hell for responding to nz’s ridiculous comment with equal but opposite hyperbole.
The motivation ascribed was absolutely correct. Can you come up with some other rationale for why the Obama administration, from the very top of the DOJ on down, was trying to create the impression that American gun shops were arming the cartels? Can you explain why there was absolutely zero followup or tracking done after the sales the BATF demanded the gunshops make?
As far as I read a certain amount of the guns were in fact recovered. For the “fast and furious” thingy for example allegedly 710 out of 2000. That proves there was some tracking, no? Abysmally bad? I think so. But “absolutely zero followup” seems hyperbole as well.
Please note that I don’t doubt that this whole idea was a colossal fuck-up. I just doubt it’s because of Obama being (having been?) the devil… or worse (reptiloid?). Excuse my hyperbole
By the way, I only came to this thread because I thought there’s news on the Taiwanese student. Anything new there, or just US related quabbles here?
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Right! Taiwanese student in USA…blah blah blah. That’s what this thread is supposed to be about, but it’s now devolved into a USA gun discussion. How about moving this off topic conversation to its own thread?
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Damn right also.im guessing we aren’t getting the full story .
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It strikes me that the reason you people are so completely incapable of comprehending why such a lie would be able to be used by the Obama administration to further their gun control agenda is that you simply do not understand how the U.S. Democrat-media alliance works.
The U.S. media will endlessly repeat whatever lie the Democrats want as their talking points. If the Democrats want to blame “white supremacists” for blacks beating up Asian grannies, then the media will damn well throw around the phrase “white supremacists” every time some black teenager beats the crap out of an Asian granny. If the Democrats want to blame Trump for the coronavirus epidemic, then the media will damn well say “it’s all Trump’s fault for not waving his magic pen and executive-ordering the virus to stay out of the United States.” And if the Democrats want to push legislation “to eliminate the gun show loophole and restrict the sale of assault weapons because Mexican cartels are arming themselves with guns from the U.S.” then the media will damn well point to “thousands of guns in the hands of Mexican cartels came from gun sales in the United States” until every moron in the U.S. who doesn’t pay attention beyond the headline remembers that whenever the topic comes up.
So? A few guns were found at crime scenes, a few were picked up during raids. None of them were actively tracked to drug kingpins or whatever else the DOJ/BATF were claiming was their rationale for the program. This merely served the narrative that they were trying to build, that guns from the U.S. were being supplied to the cartels. How obtuse are you?
If you can’t be bothered to believe someone who actually knows what she is writing about, then do your own damn research and develop an informed opinion, instead of “I don’t care enough to look into it but I refuse to believe that Saint Obama could do any wrong.”
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Is indictments the word you’re looking for?