Over at The Firearm Blog is a very thorough discussion of the types of weapons being seized in Mexico--and it pretty clearly demonstrates that the claims made by Attorney-General Holder and Secretary of State Clinton are...to be charitable, deficient. A short excerpt, but you should click over and read the whole piece:
For the past few months the media has been awash with articles discussing a new disease spreading across the USA-Mexican border, destroying lives and fueling the drug trade. The pathogen is the infamous “assault rifle” and the reason for the spread of arms is lax American gun laws, or so the American public is being told again and again.
Finally two reporters from Fox News, William La Jeunesse and Maxim Lott, took the time to look into the figures behind recent politicians’ speeches and discovered that only 13% of firearms confiscated in Mexico were of US origin. While it was a breath of fresh air to read an honest piece of journalism, I was still not satisfied with the number. It seemed incredible that an organization that is able to smuggle up to $48.4 billion [PDF link] worth of drugs into Mexico and from there export them to the US with apparent impunity are forced to purchase 13% of their arms from US gun stores selling civilian legal semi-automatic firearms, rather than the global arms black-market where just about anything can be purchased if you have the money.
To get to the bottom of this I engaged in some serious research and ended up reading up to 100 press releases and documents published by the office of the Procuraduría General de la República (Attorney General of Mexico) and US Government agencies.
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