Ninety Percent of What?

A few days ago our Secretary of State, while on her plane heading down to Mexico City, made the claim that 90 percent of the weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the United States.

The only problem with that statement is that this is all a lie. As usually happens with lies, the "statistic" made it way around the world before the truth could get its shoes on. It turns out that most guns found at Mexican crime scenes are either without serial numbers, meaning that they could not have come from the U.S. or their serial numbers were from a series that was never sold in the U.S. Amazingly, the "over ninety percent" number comes from the proportion of those guns with American markings were traced as coming from this country. And even that number is misleading, because many of those guns were fully automatic weapons that are not available for sale to civilians, and thus many were exported legally to Mexican and other south American police and military organizations, and then presumably diverted to Mexican crime lords.

Why all the mendacity? Just the usual - disregard any facts that do not comport with your agenda, and then when a lie comes up o the public radar, promote it for all it is worth. From the article:

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."

The gun grabbers want to destroy or deny the 2nd amendment, and they will use any ruse to make that happen. And that's the truth.