Project Gunrunner (Mexican Drug Cartels Say Thanks!)

Bradley J. Fikes

15 years ago

The BATF’s anti-illegal-gun program has accomplished the opposite of its mission, reports Fox News:

It is the closest thing to a smoking gun congressional investigators have in their probe of Project Gunrunner — a program that was intended to stop the flow of guns to criminals in Mexico but instead allowed those guns to be smuggled to Mexico instead.

An internal memo from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives shows that U.S. officials allowed criminals to buy 1,318 guns worth nearly $1 million, even after they suspected the buyers were working for Mexican drug cartels, and that the agency’s effort to stop the guns had “yielded little or no results.”

Patterico blogged on this outrage, pointing out this jaw-dropping information in the BATF memo, as quoted in the Fox story:

In a companion memo dated June 15, 2010, field agents say they recovered “179 crime guns in Mexico…and 130” in the U.S., but roughly 1,300 were unaccounted for and “due to the proximity to the border, bank subpoenas and financial investigations have yielded little or no results.”

Patterico writes:
It was bad enough when it was merely alleged that ATF had allowed guns to be passed to cartel members. The idea that they were actually buying them and giving them to cartel members should be all over the front pages of every newspaper in the land.

Instead, it’s seven paragraphs down in a Fox News story.

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(DISCLAIMER: This is my opinion, and not necessarily that of my employer, the North County Times.)