The Liberal Bias: Old News, Maybe, But Something Worth Remembering

Fast and Furious. No, I’m not referencing the train wreck of films starring Vin Deasil and the late Paul Walker. That was the name given for a mission of the Buruea of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to track illegal gun sales to drug cartels in Mexico.

The operation gained some national media coverage back in 2010 when United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was shot and killed. Other ATF agents went to Congress and criticized the program in general. Fox News and other conservatives drooled over it for a while, but it has fallen to the way side lately. I always suspect the reasons for this was that Obama didn’t do anything wrong, but I was recently reminded of the story and I found that the real reason it wasn’t talked about much was much more ridiculous than I had originally thought.

Way back, in the year 2006, President Bush decided that the ATF should track the illegal sale of fire arms to see if the guns were going to drug cartels in Mexico. This was called “Project Gunrunner” and it apparently yielded no indictments for anyone during Bush’s tenure as president, but this operation gave the gun sellers immunity for their cooperation, but also led to no prosectution of the buyers, or “Straw Purchasers.” No, indictments for the Straw’s didn’t happen until after Obama took office, but even then the numbers are low. Only nine arrest as of 2011.

So, here’s what I learned while I was going back through all of these stories: First, we can trace around 150 deaths of Mexican citizens from the sale of those guns. I could not find an accurate timeline for when these deaths occurred, but even if we stretch that number across all five years of “Project Gunrunner” that is still 2.5 Mexicans killed every month. Second, there was no outrage over the program until one American Border Agent was killed. Third, a lot of the guns that were being tracked into Mexico (the sole purpose of this was to find out where the drug cartels were located) were lost.

I wanted to bring Project Gunrunner up this week because I think it paints a portrait of what we seem to think is worth getting mad about. We could have asked ourselves who these drug cartels are selling their drugs to in the first place. That would be us, by the way. The U.S. is the biggest consumer of their products, and because they are illegal and there is no regulation, there is a lot of money to be had.

We could have opened a discussion about how strange it is that these assault weapons can be obtained so easily. I know that these guns were obtained illegally by the straw purchasers and the gun dealers had the help of the ATF to make it happen, but those were only the stores the ATF was watching. I can’t find any substantial arguments from the height of the controversy that asked if we were tracking the sales of all assault rifles or even considering making stricter laws and regulations for even allowing dealers to purchase one.

There did not even seem to be much of an outrage on our side over the Mexican citizens who died as a result of our operation.

No, what seems to have happened was we had one of our guys shot and killed in the line of duty and when the right found out that Obama’s name was somewhere on the paperwork they came out with their guns blazing. They came out and said, “Look at how bad he is as president.” Then, they left the argument there to be kicked around. No solutions offered.

This is the model for how most of these scandals seem to go for the right, though. So, when we go into this new election cycle and the many “scandals” of the Obama administration come up on who ever gets the primary nomination (probably Clinton, I mean who are we kidding?) just remember this: Deep breathes; it’s probably a load of crap.

Questions, comments, outrages to csullery0@frostburg.edu