How Arizona guns make it to Mexico

I am SHOCKED at the level of intellectual dishonesty which took place in this story, which portrayed American civilian gun stores as major suppliers to the Mexican Drug Cartel’s arsenals. Such falsehood is easily disproved when looking at pictures of actual confiscated, captured, and discarded cartel weaponry which are simply not available American gun stores.

Which gun store supplied drug cartels with M67 grenades? Which gun store supplied the German H&K assault rifles (easily worth $10K+ on the civilian market?), and which gun store has been supplying fully automatic weapons?

The truth is that a vast majority of the weapons used by cartels cannot be traced back to America, and the BATFE notes that less than a quarter of recovered weapons even have traceable serial numbers. Of the small fraction of weapons which have serial numbers, an even smaller amount originate from the US.

This so-called interview by Mullins of Grimaldi is a classic example of biased journalism and blatantly unprofressional reporting. For example, the data of “Mexican” gun sales in the graphic, is not weighed by the offending store’s volume. As a result the numbers displayed are essentially statistically meaningless.

Grimaldi and Mullins would have the naive World.org listener believe that U.S. firearms dealers regularly sell firearms to Mexican drug dealers who traipse across the border. If this were true, all of these stores would be closed, for such sales are blatantly illegal and would be caught in a any routine records examination by ATFE.

In truth, all buyers from an FFL dealer must complete a 4473 and produce two pieces of ID showing them to be a US citizen or resident alien. They further must answer thirteen questions and then be subjected to a NICs check–the telephone “instant check” that looks for disqualification of buying in numerous federal databases. Obviously, any Mexican drug dealer would be disqualified by any number of flags. The buyers, then, may be assumbed to be “straw buyers,” and that topic–why people are straw buyers, and why such straw buyers are not prosecuted–is one to be examined closely.

Mullins left any inquiry into the nature of these purchases unexplicated–a lapse in journalism that borders on incompetence. Since Grimaldi and Mullins both have well-established reputations as professional journalists, these lapses can be probably be best explained as bias–the proverbial “liberal” and “antigun” bias of many professional journalists. Grimaldi’s bias is well demonstrated in the WaPo’s story on which this interview is based. There are many trenchant critiques in the “comments” accompanying the stories in this series.

Mullins, on the other hand, had not damaged her reputation by stepping into this series cesspool until now. She owes The World’s audience at least a “clarification” and expansion of the missing points in this interview. More reasonably, a correction to the story she presented should be done, and presented as that–a correction.

Nominally nine months have passed since TheWorld.Org’s Mullins did her fake interview with Grimaldi, and Grimaldi’s “investigation” appears to have been nothing more than a smokescreen for The Administration’s GunWalker program.  Much of what Grimaldi claimed about these firearms retailers has turned out not only fabrication, but fabrication to hide ATF-approved sales to Mexican crime cartels. Will Grimaldi and TheWorld revisit this report and offer corrections on their reporting?  

Accurate reporting is one expectation I have of Public Radio; another is corrections and a willingness to admit being the victims of a hoax–even when the hoaxter is your favorite politician.