Here’s the angle that will put people in jail:
The only effective way to track a firearm is by the serial number. Once the firearm is out of your hands, you have no way of determining the serial number until you physically get the gun *back* in your hands.
Other than recovering them from crime scenes, there is no way to get the firearms back in DOJ/ATFE hands. In other words, for Operation F&F to be successful, the criminal would have to commit a *SECOND* crime (ie, murder in addition to illegal possesion of a firearm), AND drop the firearm at the scene where it could be recovered.
It’s not just that some of the guns ended up in the cartels’ hadns. The DOJ/ATF let the guns walk with the full intention that the guns would be recovered AFTER being used in a crime. That makes anyone who approved the operation an accessory to those secondary crimes.
Thanks for this post. I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I’ve wondered why these weapons were ‘recovered’ at crime scenes. Is that not sort of creepy?
That's an underlying truth about F&F few others mention.
The bad guys must believe their position is unassailable to exhibit such arrogance.