In Reality, Nearly Ninety Percent of Mexican Cartel Weapons DON'T Come From U.S.

Apparently, America’s love of firearms has not rubbed off on our Mexican neighbors quite as much as the mainstream media led us to believe.

It has been widely reported that 90 percent of the weapons used in the Mexican drug cartel wars come from America. As it turns out, that statistic is simply incorrect. According to the figures obtained from ICE and ATF officials by Fox News, only about 17 percent of the weapons recovered from cartel-related crime scenes in Mexico actually originate in the United States.

Correspondent William LaJeunesse in an April 2 report (first aired at 12:27PM, then a shorter segment with an ATF agent at 2:55PM:

According to the Mexican Attorney General, in the last two years, they've recovered about thirty thousand, twenty-nine thousand weapons in Mexico. They have submitted about only one-third of those to the United States for tracing. And according to testimony that we have from the special agent in charge, in Phoenix, of the ATF, only about six thousand of those were successfully traced, and about ninety percent of those came from the U.S. But basically, the bottom line here is that according to our figures, which we got from them, eighty-three percent of the guns that have been recovered in Mexico at these crime scenes are not from the United States.

One might ask how the United States Secretary of State might have made such an error in her math.

LaJeunesse explains:

Well one reason is, it's basically the sampling issue. Number one, Mexico is finding guns at the crime scene which may have no markings at all. They may be clearly Chinese or Russian weapons, and so they are not submitting those to the United States for, quote, tracing. A U.S. weapon has a serial number on it, a manufacturer on it, it says where it is made. So clearly, Mexico is not going to give over weapons to the U.S. for tracing which clearly don't come from here. We had an ICE official, special agent in charge here in Phoenix tell us, and I'm quoting from him, “Not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number. Those are not submitted. Only we trace weapons with U.S. markings.

So to summarize, ninety percent of the traced weapons that Mexico decides to give back to us come from the United States – a sample which doesn’t include the vast majority of the weapons found. Seventy-three percent outside the mark is very selective truth-telling by the mainstream media.

Sun Tzu was never wiser than when he said “All warfare is based on deception.” So when Ben Tracy (CBS News), Andrea Mitchell (NBC News) and myriad hosts from CNN all claim that the Mexican drug war is the fault of lax gun laws in the United States, you know they're all reading from the same playbook.