Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee Elijah Cummings is blaming the Second Amendment and repeating lies about how Mexican drug cartels obtain weapons to carry out lethal operations. The majority of weapons in Mexico come from Russia, Central America and China, not the United States, however, democrats and the Justice Department have been using law abiding gun shop owners as a scape goat, blaming them for the violence in Mexico since early 2009. However, new information obtained by Chairman Darrell Issa, shows is ATF responsible for violence in Mexico and the United States, not the Second Amendment and not law abiding Americans. It seems as though democrats will use this opportunity of gross government failure to push more gun control.
From Cummings opening statement:
No legitimate examination of this issue will be complete without analyzing our nation’s gun laws, which allow tens of thousands of assault weapons to flood into Mexico from the United States every year, including fifty caliber sniper rifles, multiple AK variants, and scores of others. When Mexican President Calderon addressed Congress in May, he pleaded for us to stop fueling a full-scale drug war with military grade assault weapons.
This statement is false. Tens of thousands of assault weapons do not flood into Mexico each year from the United States. This has accusation has been discredited over and over again through studies and even through WikiLeaks. The only flooding of weapons across the southern border is occuring at the hands of the U.S. government.
After months of stonewalling from the Obama Justice Department, a new scathing and damning report about Operation Fast and Furious has been released, and the initial details are ugly.
-- Agents expected to interdict weapons, yet were told to stand down and “just surveil.” Agents therefore did not act. They watched straw purchasers buy hundreds of weapons illegally and transfer those weapons to unknown third parties and stash houses.
-- ATF agents complained about the strategy of allowing guns to walk in Operation Fast and Furious. Leadership ignored their concerns. Instead, supervisors told the agents to “get with the program” because senior ATF officials had sanctioned the operation.
-- Agents knew that given the large numbers of weapons being trafficked to Mexico, tragic results were a near certainty.
-- Operation Fast and Furious contributed to the increasing violence and deaths in Mexico. This result was regarded with giddy optimism by ATF supervisors hoping that guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico would provide the nexus to straw purchasers in Phoenix.
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The family of Border Partrol Agent Brian Terry will testify today on Capitol Hill. Terry was killed in the Arizona desert by a gun traced back to ATF's lethal operation.
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