The Myth of 90 Percent: Only a Small Fraction of Guns in Mexico Come From U.S.

While 90 percent of the guns traced to the U.S. actually originated in the United States, the percent traced to the U.S. is only about 17 percent of the total number of guns reaching Mexico.

By William La Jeunesse and Maxim Lott
FOXNews.com
Thursday, April 02, 2009

You?ve heard this shocking "fact" before ~~ on TV and radio, in newspapers, on the Internet and from the highest politicians in the land: 90 percent of the weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the United States.

~~ Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it to reporters on a flight to Mexico City.

~~ CBS newsman Bob Schieffer referred to it while interviewing President Obama.

~~ California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said at a Senate hearing: "It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico and used to shoot judges, police officers and mayors ? come from the United States."

~~ William Hoover, assistant director for field operations at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, testified in the House of Representatives that "there is more than enough evidence to indicate that over 90 percent of the firearms that have either been recovered in, or interdicted in transport to Mexico, originated from various sources within the United States."

There?s just one problem with the 90 percent "statistic" and it?s a big one:

It?s just not true.

In fact, it?s not even close. By all accounts, it?s probably around 17 percent.

What?s true, an ATF spokeswoman told FOXNews.com, in a clarification of the statistic used by her own agency?s assistant director, "is that over 90 percent of the traced firearms originate from the U.S."

But a large percentage of the guns recovered in Mexico do not get sent back to the U.S. for tracing, because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the U.S.

"Not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the U.S. effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the U.S. market," Matt Allen, special agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told FOX News.

Video: Click here to watch more on where the guns come from.

A Look at the Numbers

In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Close to 6,000 were successfully traced ~~ and of those, 90 percent ~~ 5,114 to be exact, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover ~~ were found to have come from the U.S.

But in those same two years, according to the Mexican government, 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes.

In other words, 68 percent of the guns that were recovered were never submitted for tracing. And when you weed out the roughly 6,000 guns that could not be traced from the remaining 32 percent, it means 83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S.

So, if not from the U.S., where do they come from? There are a variety of sources:

~~ The Black Market. Mexico is a virtual arms bazaar, with fragmentation grenades from South Korea, AK-47s from China, and shoulder-fired rocket launchers from Spain, Israel and former Soviet bloc manufacturers.

~~ Russian crime organizations. Interpol says Russian Mafia groups such as Poldolskaya and Moscow-based Solntsevskaya are actively trafficking drugs and arms in Mexico.

- South America. During the late 1990s, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) established a clandestine arms smuggling and drug trafficking partnership with the Tijuana cartel, according to the Federal Research Division report from the Library of Congress.

~~ Asia. According to a 2006 Amnesty International Report, China has provided arms to countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Chinese assault weapons and Korean explosives have been recovered in Mexico.

~~ The Mexican Army. More than 150,000 soldiers deserted in the last six years, according to Mexican Congressman Robert Badillo. Many took their weapons with them, including the standard issue M-16 assault rifle made in Belgium.

~~ Guatemala. U.S. intelligence agencies say traffickers move immigrants, stolen cars, guns and drugs, including most of America?s cocaine, along the porous Mexican-Guatemalan border. On March 27, La Hora, a Guatemalan newspaper, reported that police seized 500 grenades and a load of AK-47s on the border. Police say the cache was transported by a Mexican drug cartel operating out of Ixcan, a border town.

?These Don?t Come From El Paso?

Ed Head, a firearms instructor in Arizona who spent 24 years with the U.S. Border Patrol, recently displayed an array of weapons considered "assault rifles" that are similar to those recovered in Mexico, but are unavailable for sale in the U.S.

"These kinds of guns ~~ the auto versions of these guns ~~ they are not coming from El Paso," he said. "They are coming from other sources. They are brought in from Guatemala. They are brought in from places like China. They are being diverted from the military. But you don?t get these guns from the U.S."

Some guns, he said, "are legitimately shipped to the government of Mexico, by Colt, for example, in the United States. They are approved by the U.S. government for use by the Mexican military service. The guns end up in Mexico that way ~~ the fully auto versions ~~ they are not smuggled in across the river."

Many of the fully automatic weapons that have been seized in Mexico cannot be found in the U.S., but they are not uncommon in the Third World.

The Mexican government said it has seized 2,239 grenades in the last two years ~~ but those grenades and the rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) are unavailable in U.S. gun shops. The ones used in an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey in October and a TV station in January were made in South Korea. Almost 70 similar grenades were seized in February in the bottom of a truck entering Mexico from Guatemala.

"Most of these weapons are being smuggled from Central American countries or by sea, eluding U.S. and Mexican monitors who are focused on the smuggling of semi-automatic and conventional weapons purchased from dealers in the U.S. border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California," according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

Boatloads of Weapons

So why would the Mexican drug cartels, which last year grossed between $17 billion and $38 billion, bother buying single-shot rifles, and force thousands of unknown "straw" buyers in the U.S. through a government background check, when they can buy boatloads of fully automatic M-16s and assault rifles from China, Israel or South Africa?

Alberto Islas, a security consultant who advises the Mexican government, says the drug cartels are using the Guatemalan border to move black market weapons. Some are left over from the Central American wars the United States helped fight; others, like the grenades and launchers, are South Korean, Israeli and Spanish. Some were legally supplied to the Mexican government; others were sold by corrupt military officers or officials.

The exaggeration of United States "responsibility" for the lawlessness in Mexico extends even beyond the "90-percent" falsehood ~~ and some Second Amendment activists believe it?s designed to promote more restrictive gun-control laws in the U.S.

In a remarkable claim, Auturo Sarukhan, the Mexican ambassador to the U.S., said Mexico seizes 2,000 guns a day from the United States ~~ 730,000 a year. That?s a far cry from the official statistic from the Mexican attorney general?s office, which says Mexico seized 29,000 weapons in all of 2007 and 2008.

Chris Cox, spokesman for the National Rifle Association, blames the media and anti-gun politicians in the U.S. for misrepresenting where Mexican weapons come from.

"Reporter after politician after news anchor just disregards the truth on this," Cox said. "The numbers are intentionally used to weaken the Second Amendment."

"The predominant source of guns in Mexico is Central and South America. You also have Russian, Chinese and Israeli guns. It?s estimated that over 100,000 soldiers deserted the army to work for the drug cartels, and that ignores all the police. How many of them took their weapons with them?"

But Tom Diaz, senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, called the "90 percent" issue a red herring and said that it should not detract from the effort to stop gun trafficking into Mexico.

"Let?s do what we can with what we know," he said. "We know that one hell of a lot of firearms come from the United States because our gun market is wide open."

But but but they're walking into gun stores on the border and buying machine guns with the things that go up!

I told you so.

push,

Can you put up a link to that article?

What is this? Fox new reporting facts? Where are the other networks on this story?

Fighting Irish?
Anybody?

Oh pa-leeze, we all know that the weapons are bought at those hillbilly redneck guy shows run by those evil blue eyed jerks that screwed to whole economy. Then they send the weapons over the border to Mexico. Thats why the AK's are Chinese made. The US imports EVERYTHING from China. Geez don't you guys know anything..............

You know, it's hard to decide who is stupider, hillary, pelosi, or obama....Why don't they fact check before they say shit. Do they really think people aren't going to check up on it?

90% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Statistics can also be used to prove anything, 14% of all people know that.

selective use of statistics is hardly new.

I am amazed at how many people buy it though. I was talking with an intelligent succesful Mexican guy at a wedding yesterday that had totally bought into the fact that the guns used in crime here had come from the states.

Obama Backs Away From Assault Gun Ban in Push to Stop Flow to Mexico

FOXNews.com

Thursday, April 16, 2009

President Obama, after meeting Thursday with Mexico?s president, signaled he is backing away from his pledge to renew the U.S. ban on assault weapons but still wishes to stop the cross-border flow of guns that wind up in the arsenals of drug cartels.

The military-style assault weapon ban expired in 2004, and Obama faced an uphill political battle in winning a renewal of the law, which is unpopular in key political states and among Republicans and some conservative Democrats.

Obama said Thursday he preferred to focus on enforcing existing laws to keep assault weapons out of Mexico, rather than trying to renew the U.S. ban on the weapons.

"We are absolutely committed to working in partnership with Mexico to make sure we are dealing with this scourge on both sides of the border," Obama said at a news conference with Calderon outlining their strategy.

"You can?t fight this war with just one hand," he said. "You can?t have Mexico making an effort and the United States not making an effort."

Obama, on his first trip to the region as president, said that he will push the U.S. Senate to ratify an inter-American arms trafficking treaty designed to curb the flow of guns and ammunition to drug cartels and other armed groups in the hemisphere. The regional treaty, adopted by the Organization of American States, was signed by former President Bill Clinton in 1997 but never ratified by the Senate.

Obama made the announcement after meeting Thursday afternoon with Calderon. The meeting is the centerpiece of Obama?s visit to Mexico, whose government is engaged in a broad war against heavily armed drug cartels now threatening the integrity of the state.

The U.S. ban on military-style assault weapons became law during the Clinton administration in 1994 and contributed to the Democrats? loss of Congress that year. It expired under the Bush administration in 2004. When Attorney General Eric Holder raised the idea of reinstituting the ban this year, opposition from Democrats and Republicans emerged quickly.

"We know that it is a politically delicate topic because Americans truly cherish their constitutional rights," Calderon said.

During his stop in Mexico City on Thursday, Obama emphasized cross-border cooperation and focused on clean energy, but the economic crisis and the bloody drug trade have set the tone.

Calderon greeted Obama to the presidential residence, Los Pinos, with an acknowledgment of the costs "to turn Mexico into a safer country." Citing a visit a half-century ago by President John F. Kennedy, Calderon called for a new era of cooperation between the neighboring countries.

"In order for Mexico to grow and prosper, Mexico needs the United States? investments, and the United States of America needs the strength of the Mexican labor force," Calderon said.

Obama echoed Caledron?s call for cooperation in his brief statements and said it was more important than ever for the two countries to work together in grappling with the drug war.

"At a time when the Mexican government has so courageously taken on the drug cartels that have plagued both sides of the border, it is absolutely critical that the United States joins as a full partner in dealing with this issue," he said.

The escalating drug war in Mexico is spilling into the United States, and confronting Obama with a foreign crisis much closer than North Korea or Afghanistan. Mexico is the main hub for cocaine and other drugs entering the U.S.; the United States is the primary source of guns used in Mexico?s drug-related killings.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told FOX News on Thursday the meetings with Mexican officials are not about pointing fingers but solving problems.

"So on the U.S. side we want to make sure that spillover violence doesn?t occur. But we also want to assist Mexico in its own efforts to make sure ~~ to clamp down on these cartels; to do what they can to break them up," she said. "Well, you?ve got to deal with several things simultaneously. One is, again, working with Mexico to increase their own law enforcement capacity. Two is, increasing our own resources at the border itself."

Calderon?s aggressive stand against drug cartels has won him the aid of the United States and the prominent political backing of Obama ~~ never as evident as on Thursday, when he left Washington to fly to the Mexican capital and stand with Calderon on his own turf.

Obama?s overnight Mexican stop came on the way to the Summit of the Americas in the two-island Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, where he hopes to set a new tone for relations with Latin America.

"We will renew and sustain a broader partnership between the United States and the hemisphere on behalf of our common prosperity and our common security," he wrote in an opinion column printed in a dozen newspapers throughout the region.

In the past, Obama said, America has been "too easily distracted by other priorities" while leaders throughout the Americas have been "mired in the old debates of the past."

More than 10,000 people have been killed in Mexico in drug-related violence since Calderon?s stepped-up effort against the cartels began in 2006. The State Department says contract killings and kidnappings on U.S. soil, carried out by Mexican drug cartels, are on the rise too.

A U.S. military report just five months ago raised the specter of Mexico collapsing into a failed state with its government under siege by gangs and drug cartels. It named only one other country in such a worst-case scenario: Pakistan. The assertion incensed Mexican officials; Obama?s team disavowed it.

Indeed, the Obama administration has gone the other direction, showering attention on Mexico.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Mexico City that the U.S. shared responsibility for the drug war. She said America?s "insatiable demand" for illegal drugs fueled the trade and that the U.S. had an "inability" to stop weapons from being smuggled south.

Obama has dispatched hundreds of federal agents, along with high-tech surveillance gear and drug-sniffing dogs, to the Southwest to help Mexico fight drug cartels. He sent Congress a war-spending request that made room for $350 million for security along the U.S.-Mexico border. He added three Mexican organizations to a list of suspected international drug kingpins.

He dispatched three Cabinet secretaries to Mexico. And he just named a "border czar."

FOX News? Mike Emanuel and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Why didn't they report that Obama reiterated the claim that ninety percent of the guns seized in Mexico came from the US? A claim which FOX has disproven.

FOX is slipping.