Now it seems that the big spike in arms supply to cartels didn’t come from local gun shops at all, but from the US government approving a rapid increase in direct sales from manufacturers to the Mexican government, whose purchases got diverted to the cartels — a fact known to the Obama administration all along. Sharyl Atkisson continues her excellent investigative reporting for CBS on OF&F with this exposé:
...Here’s how it works: A foreign government fills out an application to buy weapons from private gun manufacturers in the U.S. Then the State Department decides whether to approve.
And it did approve 2,476 guns to be sold to Mexico in 2006. In 2009, that number was up nearly 10 times, to 18,709. The State Department has since stopped disclosing numbers of guns it approves, and wouldn’t give CBS News figures for 2010 or 2011. …
The State Department audits only a tiny sample – less than 1 percent of sales – but the results are disturbing: In 2009, more than a quarter (26 percent) of the guns sold to the region that includes Mexico were “diverted” into the wrong hands, or had other “unfavorable” results.
My, my.
While the ATF allowed two thousand or so guns to “walk” across the border without the ability to track them, the Obama administration was already aware that the direct-sales program had a 26% fail rate — which would have meant almost 4,900 weapons fell into the hands of the cartels based on sales approved by the Obama administration’s State Department in 2009 alone. That’s more than twice the amount “lost” by the ATF and DoJ in OF&F. And we don’t know how much worse the problem got last year or this year, thanks to the stonewalling of the Obama administration on the numbers.
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