He Didn’t Just Lie About Arizona: Calderon Fibbed About Assault Weapons, Too

Pajamas Media » He Didn’t Just Lie About Arizona: Calderon Fibbed About Assault Weapons, Too
- by Bob Owens

In a very rare event, the president of Mexico addressed a joint session of the United States Congress last Thursday. Unfortunately, Felipe Calderon abused the opportunity by lying to the assembled representatives, senators, and government officials for the express benefit of his faltering country.

Twice.

It has already been widely reported that Calderon misrepresented Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law. His own nation’s laws punishing even poorer immigrants surging up from Central America are far more draconian, but the obvious hypocrisy apparently left no foul taste in his mouth.

What was more pathetic about his speech in front of our government is that he attacked laws Americans have passed to protect our citizens from the kidnappers, drug dealers, and murderers that are Calderon’s most worrisome export … and he received a standing ovation from Democrats for his effort.

Homeland Security Secretary (and former Arizona governor) Janet Napolitano and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder actually leapt to their feet in agreement with Calderon — objecting to a simple ten-page law they admit to not having read and which mirrors U.S. laws they will not enforce.

This was all widely seen and covered. Calderon’s second blatant lie, however, although greeted with another standing ovation from Democrats, curiously has received very little coverage and no critical opposition whatsoever.

That deception came as Calderon attempted to further meddle in U.S. affairs, declaring that Congress should reinstate the failed Clinton-era assault weapons ban to help in his battle against Mexican drug cartels...

President Calderon’s assertion that Mexico has seized around 75,000 guns and assault weapons in the last three years — and that more than 80 percent of them came from the United States — is a bald-faced lie. It simply is not remotely connected to the truth.

It is perhaps not surprising at all that the talking point used by Calderon was first trotted out by the Obama administration almost a year ago. Calderon’s 80 percent lie is simply a variation of Obama’s 90 percent lie, a falsehood that was gutted by the very government agency that traces the guns captured in Mexico.

Bill McMahon, deputy assistant director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, revealed last July that of the 100,000 weapons recovered by Mexican authorities during their drug war with the cartels, only 18,000 were determined to have been manufactured, sold, or imported from the United States.

Of those 18,000 weapons recovered and tracked to origins in the United States, just 7,900 came from sales by licensed gun dealers.

Just 8 percent of the weapons recovered by Mexican authorities came from U.S. gun shops, and the majority of those are suspected to be illegal strawman purchases, where people who passed federal background checks bought firearms and illegally transferred them to criminals.

Meanwhile, we know that 100 percent of cartel guns traced to the United States got into Mexico because of criminal behavior. Will passing another law — one that did not deter crime in the ten years it existed previously — actually stem the flow of illegal guns, when criminals are already engaged in far more serious crimes? In simple terms, Calderon’s call to resume a flawed “assault weapons” ban is laughable, because cartels simply are not obtaining real assault weapons from the United States....

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