'Fast and Furious' guns will keep doing damage

By Deroy Murdock

Scripps Howard News Service

Published: Sunday, July 8 2012 12:00 a.m. MDT

Summary

The American people finally have heard of Brian Terry. He is the best-known victim of "Fast and Furious," the Obama administration's de facto conventional-weapons proliferation program. Between November 2009 and January 2011, Team Obama arranged for licensed firearms dealers to sell guns to straw buyers, who transferred them to known violent criminals in Mexico. Among these firearms, two AK-47s were found near Rio Rico, Ariz., where suspected smugglers fatally shot Terry, a 40-year-old former Marine, on Dec. 15, 2010.

In contrast, Issa and Grassley's report observed, "ATF and DOJ leadership kept their own personnel in Mexico and Mexican government officials totally in the dark about all aspects of Fast and Furious."

"Fast and Furious has poisoned the wellspring of public opinion in Mexico as it relates to the cooperation and engagement with the United States," Mexico's ambassador to the United States, Arturo Sarukhan, said in a May 31 speech.

The Grassley-Issa report concluded that 1,048 of these weapons "remain unaccounted for." Unlike carrier pigeons, these Fast and Furious guns will not fly safely home. Instead, for years to come, they will keep drawing blood in Mexico and points north.

Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Email deroy.Murdock@gmail.com.

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Blue

Salt Lake City, UT

Read Katherine Eban's in-depth and meticulously documented article, "The Truth about the Fast and Furious Scandal" published June 27 in Fortune Magazine before going any farther on this.

The reality of the Fast and Furious More..

7:01 a.m. July 8, 2012
Top comment

MapleDon

Springville, UT

@ Blue and JoeBlow

What does "the right" have to do with this scandal? Nice try at diversion, but it doesn't work. It appears the left has had the problem with the truth--and more importantly, acknowledging it. It wasn't More..