Grenade Goof: CNN's Cooper Says Grenades Bought In United States

Should there be a background check for national reporters?  

One wonders.  On June 21, CNN’s Anderson Cooper aired a special report for CBS’ “60 Minutes.”  In this report, Cooper repeated the tired, discredited, blatantly incorrect idea that 90% of Mexican drug cartels’ arms supply comes from the United States.  In addition, Cooper showed some interesting B-roll footage of seized weapon, some of which clearly cannot be bought on the civilian market.

Initially, one might note the M16A1, M16A2, M4, and what appears to be a standard NATO-issue M60.  There are, however, semi-automatic civilian versions of some of these weapons available on the American market which look quite similar – without a closer look at the weapons, it is impossible to tell.  That being said, there also appears to be a 40mm M203 grenade launcher attachment on one of the weapons.  That, dear reader, is unavailable on the U.S. market – even in Texas.

Also unavailable on the U.S. market: The military-grade hand grenade in the same display.  Judging only from the video, this is either a Mk II “pineapple” fragmentation grenade, or a Russian F-1 “limonka” grenade.  Both of those grenades commonly use dynamite as its explosive component – which, of course, is an extremely tightly-controlled explosive in the United States.  Neither grenade can be bought in the United States at a gun show, at firearm dealerships, or as collectibles while still containing the explosive.  

In other words, the only way to create a working, all-American Mk II grenade would be to buy the pineapple-looking grenade casing, and pack it full of American-made dynamite.  Or, instead of the do-it-yourself approach, you could buy professionally-constructed grenades on the black market, somewhere other than the U.S.  Which would a well-funded drug cartel prefer?

Now then, the presence of these weapons begs the question: Where are they coming from, if not from the U.S.?  This question is never asked, as the dogged pursuit of American gun control is seen as the only answer inside the vacuous media group-think bubble.  

An alternative source for American-manufactured firearms could be Latin America.  American firearms have been sold to Latin American governments for decades – and a curious journalist might think to ask if any of those weapons have gone missing in, say, Guatemala, Bolivia, Nicaragua, or other Latin American countries to which the United States has sold military-grade weapons.

And how long might you expect to wait for this question to be asked in the main-stream media?

It might be more than “60 Minutes.”