PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
Fast and Furious Gun in Garland Latest in Long, Unending Line of Government-Enabled Crimes :: 08/04/2015
“Garland shooter bought pistol through ATF’s controversial gun running sting to track drug cartels,” the New York Daily News proclaimed, managing to pack two whoppers into one headline.
The first is that the criminal operation was a “sting,” the second that they tried to “track” anything. If you make no attempt to do the latter, the only way you’ll ever get any feedback is if you happen to come across weapons near bodies.
The frustrating thing for those of us who were breaking and reporting the story from the beginning – and banging pots and pans and screaming at the top of our lungs to get others to notice and do something about it – is that this confirms another warning we’ve been giving from early on – that Operation Fast and Furious guns were destined to be the administration “gifts” that keep on killing.
It’s not like it’s all that hard to predict. Massive numbers of guns were arranged to “walk” across the border and then vanish into the hands of murderous thugs. The deaths we know about are merely the tip of the iceberg, because unless a gun is recovered at a crime scene – the intent of the ATF managers executing the plan – we have no way of knowing for sure what was the source of the weapon used.
Here’s what we do know:
The weapons pictured above include Fast and Furious guns recovered by the Mexican military in Nov. 2009.
Before Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed, an earlier high-profile victimization took place: Mario Gonzáles Rodriguez, brother of then-Chihuahua Attorney General Patricia Gonzáles Rodriguez. He was kidnapped, tortured and murdered.
“Weapons traced back to the operation have been recovered in eight Mexican states and in Mexico City,” El Paso Times reported. [A]t least eight Fast and Furious-connected weapons were recovered at crime scenes in Juárez and four in Chihuahua City between 2010 and 2011 … On Jan. 13, 2010, the El Paso Police Department seized 40 rifles on the East Side that the congressional report said were connected to Fast and Furious. Weapons connected to the operation also were recovered in Columbus, N.M.”
After Terry, there was another law enforcement death where Fast and Furious guns were used: ICE Agency Jaime Zapata was murdered and his partner Victor Avila was critically wounded. Per Sharyl Attkisson, then with CBS News, at least two Fast and Furious guns were used, trafficked by suspects ATF had under surveillance but allowed to go their way.
Then there was a bloody 2013 gang assault on an apartment complex in Phoenix. The semiautomatic rifle found in a car that had crashed on-site was a Fast and Furious gun, but we’d have never known that had Judicial Watch not forced the information from the administration with a public records lawsuit.
As for other victims, Rep. Darrell Issa estimated “at least 200 Mexicans have been killed with these weapons and probably countless more.” Former Mexican attorney general Victor Humberto Benítez Treviño puts the number at “approximately 300.” Gonzáles Rodriguez charges “The basic ineptitude of these officials caused the death of my brother and surely thousands more victims.”
The death toll will continue to rise, because unlike the claims that Fast and Furious was a “botched gun sting” and a “failed fun tracking operation,” the true cynical purpose of intentional “gunwalking” was to have guns found next to bodies and then traced back to U.S. gun stores, to further bolster claims that “95% of Mexican crime guns come from U.S. gun stores, and to justify an “assault weapon” ban Eric Holder was floating trial balloons for a year-and-a-half before Brian Terry’s murder set things in motion to be exposed.
Holder is now out of office and free from Republican attention, and the contempt case against him is proceeding at a glacial pace that will no doubt continue past the time when Obama is no longer a politically profitable target. None of the functionaries responsible have been pursued with real consequences, and information is still being withheld that will probably only be uncovered by historians. And true to form, the stonewalling is continuing in the Garland case, with the government being coy about serial numbers and what the deal was lifting a seven-day hold they’d placed on one of the shooters.
Meanwhile, people will continue being killed with guns the “gun controllers” knowingly let loose into the criminal underworld, and we’ll only make the connection once in a great while, as most of the time, no weapons will be recovered next to the bodies.
