David Codrea

• Gun Rights Examiner

ATF is “closing ranks and circling the wagons,” William La Jeunesse of Fox News reports.

“This is much bigger than Brian Terry,” he concludes, with an assessment that the failed ATF policy of letting guns be sold to cartels through straw purchasers is “becoming a major scandal.”

See the sidebar video player for the complete report.  Noteworthy highlights:

La Jeunesse, along with many mainstream reporters, is repeating the meme that the purpose behind this operation was to track the guns to a “Mr. Big.”  That does not even consider the other more cynical motivation that has been explored since Mike Vanderboegh of Sipsey Street Irregulars and this correspondent first began reporting on this story: the allegation at CleanUpATF.org that the reason was to “’pad’ statistics.”

Think about it, and think about everything that has been corroborated to date: You don’t let thousands of guns escape into the wild, totally losing control of them, and knowing they will be found at crime scenes and traced back to U.S. gun stores, and then think that following a trail between a small-level buyer and a smaller-level user is going to lead you to the crime lord.  La Jeunesse’s analogy with drugs only works if you’re talking letting kilos of drugs at a time escape your oversight and then hoping to pin the major player by recovering small packets from the junkie on the other end of the trail.

It’s past time mainstream “authorized journalists” stopped parroting the line ATF would like them to follow—certainly Project Gunrunner had catching big players as a goal, but the directed way the specific walking operation devolved leads to a conclusion the mainstream press has yet to explore: that elements within ATF intended guns to be found exactly for the reasons reported by Vanderboegh and me, to score some media success stories, to justify expansion of ATF power and authority, and to help gin up public demand for more “gun control” laws, such as a renewed “assault weapons” ban prematurely floated by Eric Holder two years ago. The anti-gun coalition has been using the Mexican crime gun canard ever since to try and build political support for just such an attempt, resorting to—you guessed it—padding statistics to do it.