Damn, I thought all those guns spoke Gringo.

It's our politicians'  article of faith that 90 per cent of all those guns murdering women and children in Mexico come from the United States. I mean, don't we hand an  M16 to every high school kid in Texas and Arizona?

It occurs, however, that the politicians are wrong.  Almost 90 per cent of the crime weapons confiscated by Mexican cops and Federales do not come from the United States. Their cradle language is more likely to be Spanish, Korean, or Chinese.

I post the source with a caution. It's somewhat long and  full of number-crunching and other miscellaneous geekery.  Admirably so, but you may want to wait until you have a few minutes, a cup of coffee, and an appetite for detailed  analysis before clicking here, to STRATFOR.

A sample: According to the GAO report, some 30,000 firearms were seized from criminals by Mexican authorities in 2008. Of these 30,000 firearms, information pertaining to 7,200 of them (24 percent) was submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for tracing. Of these 7,200 guns, only about 4,000 could be traced by the ATF, and of these 4,000, some 3,480 (87 percent) were shown to have come from the United States.


That is, Officer Hernandez and his Jefe set aside their powdered enchiladas, look over  last month's weapons haul (slipping the especially nice or salable ones into their personal tucker bags) and make two piles. One is for those guns which might have come from the north. The other one is for guns so obviously non-U.S. related that not even a BATF  desk pogue would be fooled. They send the  data on the former  to Washington, salted with just  enough possibly non-U.S-loophole weapons to create a veneer of credibility.

It would take only a C+ student of sixth-grade arithmetic to suggest that  the 3,840 identified as U.S.-acquired be divided by the 30,000 seized to announce that 87 per cent  of of the crime guns in that woebegone country were acquired from non-U.S. sources.

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With 3,000 murders  a year in Jaurez alone, doesn't that 30,000 total crime guns seized  across the country  suggest a certain relaxed  attitude toward solving crimes down there? Manana, Senor Jefe

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I'm indebted to my pal Alan for STRATFOR piece.