I’m still confused—what was f&f supposed to have accomplished? Was it to demonstrate that guns are bad and have a ground for gun control?
Somebody help a naive girl out—can you explain it to me or send me a link that could help me understand?
The administration pushed the idea that it was guns from American gunshops that were causing the accelerated violence in the drug cartel wars in Mexico. This might have worked 15 years ago, but the new media quickly found that assertion to be the fraud that it was and exposed it.
In order to push that idea, and especially the idea that legislation or regulation was necessary to prevent the flow of semi-automatic “assault weapons” to Mexico, the ATF forced and encouraged American gun dealers to sell guns to straw purchasers, with no intention of tracking or recovering them, except at crime scenes in Mexico. Mexican authorities were not informed, and there was no plan or known means to make cases against the drug cartels from the fact that guns connected to American gun dealers were found at Mexican crime scenes. At the minimum, over 2,000 guns were involved. The number may have been much more, we do not know. The program was only stopped after an American Border Patrol agent was killed with one of the “walked” guns. Many of the guns were paid for with money from the FBI.
The ATF pushed for a regulation to require that if any two or more semiautomatic rifles were sold within a week, that had to be reported to the ATF by dealers in the Southwest. This flies in the face of existing law, and opens the door to the creation of a defacto national registration of these guns, because an existing program involving pistols, does exactly that.
Despite intense opposition to the rule, the ATF put it into effect, even though they are likely, through Fast and Furious/Gunwaker/Murdergate, to be the primary source of the firearms in question.
Here is a link to another summation of the scandal and how it has been developing:
There is also the fact that at least TWO Americans, Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata, both of whom worked for OUR government, were murdered in cold blood by walked weapons and MIGHT have been set up.
OR it was an operation to create the illusion that a liberal lie about gun sellers was the truth. Guns were sold (NO tracking devices) to Mexican drug cartels in hopes that those guns could be used as an excuse for more gun control. Kind of like when democrats send fake letters to journalists pretending to be conservatives who are haters. Or like Hitler's SS sending raunchy letters to Germans - pretending they're written by Jews. It's an old game, but MSM falls for it because they want to...
The following articles also put a fine point on what has happened.
The Department of Justice ’ s Operation Fast and Furious: Accounts of ATF Agents(above) Four ATF field agents testify under oath that they "never even heard of intentionally letting guns "walk" before F&F."
‘Wide Receiver’ CI: ‘It had nothing to do with Bush or even DOJ’
New Documents Highlight Differences in Bush-Era, Obama-Era Gunrunner Investigations