You have to read the fine print to understand Obama’s idea of border protection. One new phrase caught my attention: “gunrunner teams”:
AP NewsBreak: Courts need $40M for border plan, June 29, 2010
President Barack Obama’s $600 million border security plan seems to have it all: More than 1,000 agents, seven gunrunner teams, five FBI task forces and more prosecutors and immigration judges.
“Seven gunrunner teams” — say what?
An article from southern Arizona was more explanatory:
National Guard to send 524 to Arizona border, Sierra Vista Herald, June 29, 2010
[Presidential assistant John] Brennan told the governor the additional funding will help pay for 500 more Border Patrol agents for Arizona as well as 50 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, along with additional Department of Justice assets to include Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm Gunrunner Teams, which will monitor the movement of weapons into Mexico, and special FBI squads.
Such neighborly projects do not come cheap. The Inspector General’s Interim Review of ATF’s Project Gunrunner noted, “Project Gunrunner is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) national initiative to reduce firearms trafficking to Mexico and associated violence along the Southwest border. In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) and in fiscal year (FY) 2009 appropriations, ATF received $21.9 million in funding to support and expand Project Gunrunner.”
Part of the backstory here is Mexico Presidente Calderon’s efforts to blame America for his country’s crime anarchy by attacking our Constitutional right to self-defense using firearms, alleging that guns shipped from this country are the source of the violence. He pushed this false charge at length during his rude state visit to Washington in May.
By making the argument that border chaos has a “shared” guilt, Calderon can mooch more money from weak-minded Washington politicians, like the generous trough of cash and materiel supplied by the Merida Initiative. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is an enabler in this regard; see the 2009 CNN report, U.S. shares blame for Mexico drug violence, Clinton says for a typical example.
However, Fox News reported last year that “only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S.” (The Myth of 90 Percent: Only a Small Fraction of Guns in Mexico Come From U.S., April 4, 2009).
A small handful of US guns make their way to Mexico. But as the former Border Patrol agent mentioned in the preceding video, a container ship full of guns from China is easy enough for billionaire drug cartels to order up. Restricting Americans’ gun rights will not reduce violence in Mexico one tiny bit, because the global small arms trade is huge, profitable and isn’t going away.
So the question remains: Why is Washington wasting precious resources on non-problems like guns from America headed south? The big important suits must believe that supporting Calderon is vital to prevent a full-tilt narco state and tens of millions of Mexicans making a run for the border.
But hoping that corrupt Mexico might shape up is a poor bet. Ceding territory to drug cartels (as has already happened in Arizona) is only the most recent indicator that far more border enforcement is required.
And here’s a crazy thought: why doesn’t Mexico have its own border police keep all those nasty US guns out if they are such a crisis? There are plenty of Mexican agents in that locale already, e.g. Grupo Beta and regular police. Why does America have to be responsible for problems going both ways? President Obama characterized Mexico as a “partner” more than a dozen times in his welcoming speech to Calderon last spring, but actual partnership behavior from our southern neighbor is hard to discern.
What’s wrong with this picture?
