Very early in Barack Obama’s Presidency, he and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, along with his unscrupulous gun-running Attorney General Eric Holder, attempted to manufacture the so-called “90-percent lie.”

They swore, repeatedly and in public, that 90% of the firearms being recovered in Mexico came from unscrupulous firearms dealers in the United States.

That claim was an abject an intentional lie.

The myth that legal guns sales in the United States are responsible for Mexican drug cartel violence took another serious blow last week when an ATF official testified in Congress that only eight percent of weapons recovered in Mexico came through licensed U.S. gun dealers.

This figure is far lower than the 90 percent claim made previously as an appeal to reinstate ineffective gun laws that expired in 2004. The claim — still active among the less informed or serially dishonest — officially became myth during congressional testimony last week when Bill McMahon, deputy assistant director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, revealed the eight percent figure, how it was calculated, and where the 90 percent myth arose from.

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.

Democrats are once again trying to resurrect this same lie as the serially dishonest Obama administration draws to a close.

Unfortunately for them, it is debunked in a note to the very first graph in the government’s report (pdf).

NOTE: These figures reflect firearms seized by Mexican authorities and traced by ATF, not all firearms seized in Mexico.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is an exercise in lying by omission by anti-gun Democrats.

Let me explain how this sleight of hand is accomplished.

The Mexican government confiscates hundreds of thousands of firearms in their War on Drug Cartels Who Aren’t Paying Enough Vig to Corrupt Politicians (WDCWAPEVCP).

Let me be very clear on the next point.

Less than 20 percent of all the weapons confiscated in Mexico comes from the United States.

The vast majority of these firearms come from Africa, Asia, and other Central and South American sources, through the exact same smuggling pipelines used to smuggle heroin and cocaine. 80-percent or more of firearms confiscated in Mexico are not submitted to the ATF for tracing, as they clearly come from nations that are not the United States.

The only firearms submitted to the ATF for tracking are those guns that contain markings or parts that show they were either made or imported into the United States.  The United States requires all guns made or imported to have very distinct markings, like these four below randomly pulled off a Google Image search.

Surprising no one, a high number of the guns marked “Made in USA” or “Imported into the USA” live up to their billing, but they still represent a tiny fraction of the overall total, and actually represent a declining number of U.S. firearms recovered in Mexico, even after the Obama Administration ran thousands of guns to the Sinaloa cartel and other drug cartels in an attempt to raise these figures, costing more than 300 lives in the process.

Serially dishonest liberals, like Bryan Shatz (no seriously, that’s his real name) of Mother Jones, don’t reflect that in their reporting, and lie by omission, telling only part of the story.

The report, commissioned by Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and published yesterday, reveals that 70 percent—more than 73,000—of the guns recovered from crime scenes in Mexico and traced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from 2009 to 2014 originated in the United States. These weapons have fueled the ongoing war among the drug cartels and between the cartels and Mexican security forces, contributing to the more than 100,000 killings in the country since 2007.

Someone quickly reading Shatz’s craptastic reporting would be left with the impression that 70-percent of the cartel guns in Mexico had their origins in the U.S., when the reality is that of the < 20% of the guns recovered in Mexico are handed over the the ATF for tracing, and that only 70% of those < 20% pan out as from actually being from the United States.

Bill Chappell of NPR pulls the same deceptive trick as Shatz.

And journalists wonder why people have such a low opinion of their integrity!

In reality, less than 8 percent of all cartel guns come from U.S. gun shops, according to previous ATF testimony, and those figures seem to be declining.