IRONY IS DEAD: Democrats Continue to Block Gun Trafficking Investigations As They Push Trafficking Bill

Elijah E. Cummings (D-Maryland), has been a partisan roadblock into the House Oversight Committee’s investigation of Operation Fast And Furious, which provided weapons traced to hundreds of murders.
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House Democrats pushing what they call the “Gun Trafficking Prevention Act of 2015” are stooping to outright lies in order to fabricate a need for their legislation.

The bill is ironically offered by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Maryland), who has done everything in his power to assist the Obama Administration’s stonewalling of the House Oversight Commitee’s investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, one of up to ten gun-walking plots carried out by Obama’s Department of Justice and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

The Democrat press release announcing the bill claims:

On Wednesday, September 9, 2015, Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-New York), Patrick Meehan (R-Pennsylvania), Elijah E. Cummings (D-Maryland), and Robin Kelly (D-Illinois) will hold a press conference to announce the re-introduction of a bipartisan bill in the House of Representatives to make firearms trafficking a federal crime and impose stronger penalties for “straw purchasers” who buy guns for convicted felons and others who are prohibited from buying guns on their own.

The re-introduction of The Gun Trafficking Prevention Act of 2015 comes on the heels of a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing tomorrow on violence at the U.S.-Mexico border.  In March, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms reported that more than 100,000 guns were recovered in Mexico and submitted for tracing from 2009 to 2014.  Of those, 70% originated in the United States.

This legislation directly addresses concerns raised by law enforcement officials who have testified before Congress that a dedicated firearms trafficking statute would help them combat the flow of thousands of firearms to violent criminals, international drug cartels, and a host of other dangerous people.

This bill is also cosponsored by Reps. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pennsylvania), Peter King (R-New York), and Dan Donovan (R-New York).

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I guess we should be thankful that these politicians are at least ratcheting back the scale of their lies.

Months after Barack Obama took office in 2009, key figures in his administration—including President Barack Obama, then Attorney General Eric Holder, and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—were pushing what we quickly revealed as “The 90 Percent Lie.”

These politicians repeatedly told the American people that 90-percent of the guns found in cartel violence in Mexico had their origins in the United States, primarily from gun shops in southwestern border states.

Citizens didn’t knew at the time that the Obama Department of Justice was actively supplying the narco-terrorist cartels (particularly the Sinaloa cartel) with firearms though numerous gun-walking plots in every border state until much later. It was only after a pair of “walked” guns was recovered at the scene of BORTAC agent Brian Terry’s murder that the plot began to unravel.

Today, the Obama Administration is still fighting a desperate rearguard action to cover up their complicity. Yesterday, Justice Department lawyers attempted to block discovery of how the men on trial for killing Terry acquired their weapons through Operation Fast and Furious.

While Obama lied about the percentage of guns of U.S. origin in 2009 (even as his administration was providing them to narco-terrorists) when he claimed 90-percent came from American gun dealers, and today’s still-stonewalling Democrats claim it is 70-percent, both figures are intentionally rigged and intentionally dishonest.

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Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-New York), Patrick Meehan (R-Pennsylvania), Elijah E. Cummings (D-Maryland), and Robin Kelly (D-Illinois) are either incompetently informed, or intentionally lying… and I’m strongly leaning towards the later.

While the ATF is more than happy to be dishonest as an agency in a vague report, they sing an entirely different tune when you put individual ATF agents under oath and force them to be honest in front of Congress.

We discovered that just 18-percent of the firearms recovered from cartels came from the United States, and less than half of those (7,900) came came from dealers, many of whom were providing guns to the cartels as part of the ATF’s gunwalking plots.

Of the 100,000 weapons recovered by Mexican authorities, only 18,000 were determined to have been manufactured, sold, or imported from the United States, and of those 18,000, just 7,900 came from sales by licensed gun dealers.

Both Mexican President Felipe Calderón and American President Barack Obama have tried to claim that 90 percent of the firearms used by Mexican drug cartels originate in the United States. These claims have been echoed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder and his assistants, liberal members of both houses of Congress, and a reliably anti-gun media. They hoped to use the shocking statistic to lay the groundwork for a reinstatement of the 1994 “assault weapons” ban that expired in 2004.

The “assault weapons” ban outlawed 19 firearms by name, but otherwise merely banned certain cosmetic features. The practical effect of the ban was no ban at all; the exact same firearms — minus the banned cosmetic features — were back on dealer shelves the very next day with no decrease in lethality, accuracy, capacity, or rate of fire.

Like most gun laws, the “assault weapon” ban had negligible impact on crime. The only measurable practical effect was that one provision of the ban — a 10-round limit on the magazine capacity of newly manufactured magazines — encouraged the development of the smallest guns possible that could carry ten rounds of ammunition. The resulting subcompact class of centerfire semi-automatic handguns is a direct if accidental result of the ban that the bill co-author, then Senator Joe Biden, certainly didn’t intend.

But anti-gun politicians rarely miss a chance to call for more control even if the laws are proven failures, and the administration found the 90 percent claim to be a useful cudgel. It was also a complete, utter, and demonstrable lie.

William La Jeunesse and Maxim Lott of Fox News were among the first to puncture the myth. They revealed that the 90 percent figure came from the number of guns that the Mexican authorities turned over to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Ninety percent of the firearms turned over to the ATF were determined to be from the United States.

But only a fraction of the guns recovered by the Mexican authorities were turned over to the ATF, because most of the weapons recovered had markings that clearly identified their origins in other countries. Of nearly 100,000 weapons recovered from the cartels, only 20 percent had been turned over to the U.S. for identification, and a total of 18,000 were determined to have been manufactured, sold, or imported from the United States.

Instead of 90 percent, the actual number of weapons recovered in Mexico that came from the U.S. was just 18 percent.

As a result of this inconvenient truth, the myth being pushed by the Obama administration and championed by anti-gun elements of the media quietly went away.

Eight percent is a far cry from the 90 percent that the administration had been wanting to claim, and considering that there are more than 6,600 licensed dealers in the border region, it means (statistically speaking) just over one gun per licensed dealer has found it’s way across the border.

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Just 7,900 of the nearly 100,000 firearms recovered from cartels came from U.S. dealers. U.S. gun dealers may have provided as many as 20,000 guns to cartels in gun-walking operations run by the ATF in up to ten cities, none of which have been investigated by a government that has no interest in indicting itself.

Do you want to stop gun trafficking, Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-New York), Patrick Meehan (R-Pennsylvania), Elijah E. Cummings (D-Maryland), and Robin Kelly (D-Illinois)?

Put Erik Holder, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and their minions at the Department of Justice/ATF, Department of State, and the White House under oath. Let them explain how tens of thousands of weapons were smuggled to narco-terrorists under the orders of the United States government.

These Democrats want to stop gun trafficking?

Good.

They can start by stopping their participation in the stonewalling Congressional Oversight Committee, which is still attempting to discover who precisely who is responsible for gun walking plots that are provided weapons used in more than three hundred murders of citizens and law enforcement officers on both sides of the border.

Until they’re willing to hold their own party responsible for its gross gun trafficking violations, I don’t want to hear another word from them.

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