Federal agents are barely able to slow the river of American guns flowing into Mexico.
In two years, a new effort to increase inspections of travelers crossing the border has netted just 386 guns — an almost infinitesimal amount given that an estimated 2,000 slip across each day.
The problem came into sharp focus again last month when a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was killed on a northern Mexican highway with a gun that was purchased in a town outside Fort Worth, Texas.
Stopping the flow of American guns, bullets and cash has long bedeviled authorities on both sides of the border.
There are some problems with this angle (and let us not even go into the American demand for cartel drugs). One, the "study" cited that claims 2,000 weapons slip across the border each day (730,000 a year!) gives no estimate of how the number was calculated, as even the article admits. Nor, I should add, does it speak to how many firearms go to Mexicans who want to defend themselves in the crossfire and how many go to cartels.
Second, the BATF program to try to track arms sales from the US to cartels actually allows weapons into cartel hands.
Third, that 90% of cartel guns are American-purchased weapons is pure myth.
Other than those problems, the myth--and the AP analysis--is just fine.
Still, with a bushel of lemons sitting there on the border, I say make the best of the situation. Don't we owe it to our Mexican brethren to wall up the US-Mexican border and actually defend it to keep arms out of Mexico? If that keeps illegals out of here, well, that is just acceptable collateral damage to help out our friends in the middle of a drug war.
