Most Rifles Confiscated In Mexico Are Made For U.S. Military

The source: Deserters recruited from the Mexican Army take their carbines along

American gun control advocates, outraged that most weapons seized south of the border from drug cartel members are from the U.S., have trumpeted the news that the BATFE is cracking down on gun sellers and shops this side of the border.

A former U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend said recently, “While the Mexican drug war has the media and Washington abuzz, there has been little mention of our role in supplying the terrorists: We need to realize that the Mexican drug cartels are arming themselves here because our gun laws have loopholes so large that criminals and gun traffickers can easily drive gun-laden trucks through them.” She lamented the fact that the Mexican Attorney General, Medina Mora, called U.S. Gun laws “absurd.”

Ms. Kennedy-Townsend is the daughter of the late U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy. She is also a board member of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Let's huff, puff and struggle to get in a word edgewise, here.

Maybe she would be interested to know that 9 out of 10 guns seized from Mexican drug gangsters are not only manufactured in the U.S., they are manufactured by the U.S. Government under military contracts with such arms manufacturers as Colt Arms in Connecticut and Fabrique Nacional in Belgium.

They aren't the garden variety weapons you can find down at the local gun show or the hardware store.

These weapons are capable of “select fire,” meaning they may be fired fully automatic, in 3-round bursts, or in single discharges in semi-automatic mode.

Such weapons are not available in gun shops, nor are FFL dealers allowed to sell them at gun shows.

They are supplied by the U.S. Government to the Mexican Army.

So, how do they find their way into the arsenals of drug-smuggling gangs such as the Gulf Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel or the Zetas?

Their former owners deserted from the Mexican Army and took them along where they traded them in for a new career at thousands of percent more than they were making yearly as soldiers.

Since the year 2000, an average of 16,000 soldiers each year have deserted and taken their carbines with them. If each soldier brought only one rifle, that would amount to 160,000 fully-automatic battle carbines.

Where did these weapons come from? U.S. Arsenals supplied them under the terms of military assistance programs, programs which have increased since the crack-down on drug-dealing gangsters which began in 2006 under the leadership of President Felipe Calderon. At the present, hundreds upon hundreds of innocent people are losing their lives in border violence fought between rival gangsters to control the lucrative drug trade routes which terminate in the U.S., transiting the border at Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, El Paso, Nogales and San Diego. More than 28,000 have perished over the past 4 years.

Not long ago, a California television station's investigative reporting team toured a Mexican armory in downtown Tijuana and saw thousands upon thousands of American M-16's that were confiscated from the drug cartels. Though they took down large lists of serial numbers and forwarded them to the FBI and ATF to learn if they could be confirmed either sold in gun shows or shops or were shipped under U.S. Contract, they have so far received no reply.

But the M-16 in all its editions is not the only assault rifle Mexican soldiers seize on a routine basis. There is that veritable communist tractor of a weapon, the AK-47, also designed and manufactured as a select fire weapon – both rock and roll and semi-auto. Bear in mind that you don't just walk into a gun shop or a gun show and buy those, either.

What you see for sale are manufactured in China, Russia, Romania and Yugoslavia at AK-47 factories using identical parts, except for the trigger group, bolt and bolt carrier groups. Everything else, including the barrel, firing pin and gas piston are of identical type. Most are imported to these shores by Century International Arms (CIA).

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez proudly announced he will be opening a new manufacturing facility in his country, equipped and supplied by the Russian government. The product: AK-47's and other assault weapons of Russian design.

An item you see in the news photos every time the Mexican Army pulls off a successful raid are rocket-propelled grenades and launchers.

The problem there is that anyone can tell by their distinctive plumber's plunger shape that they are of Communist bloc manufacture.

How would the Mexicans get them? They sure as hell didn't walk into a gun shop in Phoenix or a gun show in Dallas to score them.

Uncle Sam took down some very heavily-armed insurgent armies 20 years ago in the jungles of Honduras and Nicaragua. It was a very successful component of foreign policy prosecuted by the Reagan and Bush administrations.

But there is still one other little problem.

Where do all those hand grenades come from? Every propaganda picture is just filled with row after row of frag and rifle-launched grenades stacked in gleaming ranks on the floor beside the tables filled with M-16's.

Where did they come from?

They, too, come from U.S. Arsenals. The ubiquitous B67 fragmentation grenade is of American manufacture and the Department of Defense shipped more than 300,000 of them to various Central American republics when they were fighting Communist insurgency in the mid-80's to early 90's.

There have been 101 grenade attacks in the past 3 1/2 years, 72 of them within the last 12 months, according to newly released information. The advent of the Zetas brought forth the use of the deadly devices. The method of choice among the assailants is to roll the grenades through the open doors of brothels and cantinas in border towns such as Juarez and Reynosa.

There is little evidence of grenades entering Mexico from the U.S. border.

There have been many seizures of the grenades. More than 550 were recovered in a raid on a Zetas training camp in northern Guatemala. Salvadoran police have seized 390 of them since 2005.


They sell for anywhere from $100 to $500 the copy these days. Even if they are rusty and dirty, they still work perfectly because they were designed to be stored for decades, if necessary.

Mexican police are now offering as much as $200 for each grenade turned in to authorities.

It might be a good idea to hold on to Pappy's squirrel gun, just for drill, since our government is so energetic about arming and equipping the gangsters who live on the other side of the border.

It might just be what old James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and others had in mind when they wrote those immortal words about a militia being of the utmost necessity and the reason that the right of the people to keep and bear arms should not be infringed.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, during a 100-day Gun Runner Impact Team (GRIT) sweep, BATFE agents seized approximately 1,300 “illegally trafficked” firearms and 71,000 rounds of ammunition in 174 firearms-trafficking related investigations.