Thursday, April 02, 2009

Way not to give any background here, folks...

You know, one could take this in only God knows how many ways...

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reports that up to 95 percent of guns seized at scenes of drug violence in Mexico can be traced to U.S. commercial sources. These weapons are increasingly higher-powered, including .50 caliber rifles and armor-piercing ammunition.
One could read that and think the Mexicans were indeed getting their hardware from American gun stores. Or that this was another way to conflate semiautomatic and fully automatic weaponry...because I'm sure not that many people are going to know that the U.S. military gets all of its weaponry from private-sector (read: commercial) sources such as Beretta, Kimber and Colt since the Springfield Armory (not to be confused with the Illinois firearm manufacturer of the same name) closed in 1968, and so they're going to think Joe Blow can walk into his friendly local gun store and get himself a government-issue select-fire M-16 or M-4 with no paperwork. At any rate, you'll see the reporter didn't come right out and say that those guns could be traced to American gun stores. So she says "commercial sources," leaving it wide-open for interpretation. It's worth asking how many of those weapons were once in the possession of the Mexican military, courtesy of the Merida Initiative. One wonders what happened to real reporting, with background and such...
As for that "armor-piercing ammunition"...of course, as has been said before, this could cover just about any rifle caliber, assuming we're talking about regular old body armor. Of course, I'm sure the reporter probably wanted to make the readers think "tank armor" or something like that...but, again, what happened to that real reporting?