Look over there! At Fast and Furious!

by David Safier

Fast and Furious gets a whole lot of press. Darrell Issa is making sure of that. What's getting less press is the number of guns flowing across the border illegally. That's the activity Fast and Furious, and the Bush-era Operation Wide Receiver, tried, unsuccessfully, to address.

An AP article in the Star talks about the amount of ammunition going across the border on a daily basis. You can't fire guns if you don't have bullets. (Chris Rock once suggested a way to cut down on gun violence: make guns easy to get but charge $6,000 for a bullet.)

And ammunition is hard to get in Mexico.

In Mexico, ammunition is strictly regulated, and possession of even a single illegal round can lead to prison.

So the easiest way to get ammunition in Mexico is to smuggle it from the U.S. In the fiscal year ending September 30, 95,416 rounds were confiscated at the border. Undoubtedly, far more than that escaped detection and found its way into Mexican criminal hands.

The ATF screwed up under Bush and Obama in its attempts to track guns flowing into Mexico, but those guns aren't the major problem. The outcry from Issa and the NRA are a purposeful distraction from the regular flow of weapons and ammunition into Mexico due to inadequate regulation of gun sales.