Has Calderon stepped in to push Fast & Furious agenda?

Has Mexican President Felipe Calderon stepped in as a surrogate to push what many Northwest gun rights activists believe is the underlying goal of the Obama administration’s Operation Fast & Furious; that is, renewal of the ban on so-called “assault weapons” that he now blames for the casino massacre last week in Monterrey, as reported by Reuters?

Gun owners have been discussing this all weekend on the Northwest Firearms forum, and they are not happy. They are also talking about it at WaGuns and Gun Rights Media.

According to the Centre Daily Times in College Station, PA, Calderon is now busily blaming the “criminal sale of high-powered weapons and assault rifles” that end up in the hands of drug cartel gunmen for enabling the attack that killed 52 people and left the casino ablaze.

My colleague, National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea, talks about the situation here.

"Part of the tragedy that we Mexicans are living through has to do with the fact that we are next to the world's greatest drug consumer, and also the greatest global arms vendor that pays billions of dollars each year to criminals."—Mexican President Filipe Calderon

Many in the gun rights community are convinced that the real motivation behind Operation Fast and Furious – the discredited gun trafficking sting mounted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the fall of 2009 – was to bump up the numbers on recovered U.S.-origin guns at Mexican crime scenes. This, they say, would give more credence to early Obama administration claims that the majority of Mexican crime guns come from this country.

If Calderon has a problem with guns flooding into his country, he might want to take that up with Eric Holder and Ken Melson, William Newell and William McMahon, and maybe even Barack Obama. It is to them that gun rights activists believe he should have directed this remark:

"We are neighbors, allies and friends. But you, too, are responsible. This is my message."

This might be a good time to ask Calderon who killed ICE agent Jaime Zapata in February, and Border Patrol agent Brian Terry last December.

While this melodrama is playing out, another battle is being fought between Congressman Darrell Issa and the New York Times. Issa was the subject of a Times hit piece some days ago, discussed by this column. The Times is editorially partisan toward anything Obama, and is decidedly anti-gun on its editorial page as well, and is firing back at Issa's demand for a retraction of many claims the newspaper made that the Congressman says are false.

Issa’s investigation of Operation Fast and Furious threatens to take responsibility for the scandal all the way to the White House, and many in the gun rights community are suspicious that the Times story about Issa was deliberately published to deflect public attention away from Issa’s probe. When Congress returns next week, there may be new developments and perhaps some indication when another hearing on the operation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will be held.

The public still needs to hear from Melson and from George Gillett, who became something of a whistleblower earlier in the investigation, when it started looking like he might get tossed under the bus. And, of course, there is Holder, under whose nose all of this is supposed to have occurred without him really knowing about it.

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