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GAO report being deliberately misinterpreted for sensationalism
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A new report issued by the Government Accountability Office headlined Firearms Trafficking: U.S. Efforts to Combat Arms Trafficking to Mexico Face Planning and Coordination Challenges is being deliberately misinterpreted by gun prohibitionists to push a gun ban agenda.
Gun banners are claiming that the report reinforces their earlier allegations that 87-90 percent of all the guns being seized by Mexican authorities came from this country. It’s not true.
A report appearing in the next issue of Gun Week, a newspaper owned by the Second Amendment Foundation that is considered by many to be the “newspaper of record of the firearms community” raises serious questions about the reliability of the report, and how it is being used by anti-gunners.
The Gun Week report, under my byline, details how easy it is for people to be misled by what is written, but also how the agenda-driven gun prohibitionist lobby can exploit the public’s lack of knowledge about what is really happening south of the border.
Gun rights scholar David Kopel at Colorado’s Independence Institute called the report nothing more than a re-hash of earlier faulty information.
The GAO report even misled a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, whose Thursday story revealed his lack of basic math skills, or perhaps that he did not read beyond the introduction.
In 2008, of the almost 30,000 firearms that the Mexican Attorney General’s office said were seized, only around 7,200, or approximately a quarter, were submitted to ATF for tracing
The report lists the estimated number of firearms traced back to this country – including some that were allegedly traced all the way to Washington State – for the five years ranging from 2004 through 2008. There were, the GAO figures show, 20,060 estimated guns traced to the US. However, there is no perspective by showing the total number of guns seized by Mexican authorities until the following page of the report, when it reveals that in just 2008, almost 30,000 firearms were confiscated by the Mexicans. Of those, Mexico asked for traces on only 7,200 guns, less than 25 percent of the total.
Of that 25 percent – the 7,200 firearms – ATF was able to trace 6,700 back to the United States. That figure does not constitute 90 percent, or even 87 percent, of the estimated 30,000 guns the Mexicans captured last year. It represents approximately 22 percent of the total gun seizures, yet the “mainstream press” is accepting the 87 percent or 90 percent figure as gospel without even sitting down with a calculator to do the math.
The situation is not helped at all by the GAO’s Jess Ford, who told me in an e-mail that, “Most guns traced from seizures came from (the) US.” It would be just as easy to state, as he did a few lines later in the same message in response to my question about the actual percentage of guns traced that “About a quarter of guns seized by Mexico were traced in 2008.”
What’s wrong with simply explaining that approximately 25 percent of guns seized by Mexican officials have been traced to sources in the United States?
The GAO report also demonstrates a glaring lack of basic firearms knowledge. It alleges that “around 25 percent of the firearms seized in Mexico and traced in fiscal year 2008 are high-caliber and high-powered such as AK and AR-15 type semiautomatic rifles, which fire ammunition that can pierce armor often used by Mexican police.”
In addition to firearms, some grenades and rocket launchers have been seized by Mexican government agencies that, according to ATF officials, generally had come from stocks in Central American countries that had obtained the weapons from the United States in the 1980s or, since then, through the foreign military sales process.
The AR-15 fires a 5.56mm/.223 Remington cartridge, which is designed for shooting prairie dogs and other varmints. It fires a .223-caliber bullet that admittedly has a high velocity, but when compared to cartridges typically used by American deer hunters, it is neither “high caliber” nor “high powered.”
Likewise, the AK-type rifle uses the 7.62x39mm cartridge, which is roughly the equivalent of the .300 Savage, a mid-range deer hunting cartridge whose energy is easily eclipsed by the more common .30-06 used by your grandfather every October to hunt whitetails.
Over the five years between 2004 and 2008, only 70 AK and AR type rifles illegally altered to fire fully-automatic were seized by the Mexican authorities, representing a scant 0.30 percent of a total number of 23,159. Presumably, that last figure alludes to the number of firearms about which the Mexicans submitted inquiries for tracing, but that figure does not square with the approximate number of guns that the report said were actually traced.
It is no wonder why so many people in the firearms community are skeptical if not downright critical and dismissive of this GAO report. What is a wonder is that so many other people are willing to accept it as gospel just because the gun prohibitionists say so.
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