The Biggest Scandal In U.S. History

    Ann Coulter

Forget executive privilege, contempt of Congress, "fast and furious," how many documents the government has produced and who said what to whom on which date.

The Obama administration has almost certainly engaged in the most shockingly vile corruption scandal in the history of the country, not counting the results of Season Eight on "American Idol."

Administration officials intentionally put guns into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, so that when the guns taken from Mexican crime scenes turned out to be American guns, Democrats would have a reason to crack down on gun sellers in the United States.

Democrats will never stop trying to take our guns away. They see something more lethal than a salad shooter and wet themselves.

But since their party was thrown out of Congress for the first time in nearly half a century as a result of passing the 1994 "assault weapons ban," even liberals know they're going to need a really good argument to pass any limitation on guns ever again.

So it's curious that Democrats all started telling the same lie about guns as soon as Obama became president. In March 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced to reporters on a trip to Mexico: "Since we know that the vast majority, 90 percent of that weaponry (used by Mexican drug cartels), comes from our country, we are going to try to stop it from getting there in the first place."

As she sentimentally elaborated on Fox News' Greta Van Susteren show: "The guns sold in the United States, which are illegal in Mexico, get smuggled and shipped across our border and arm these terrible drug-dealing criminals so that they can outgun these poor police officers along the border and elsewhere in Mexico."

Suddenly that 90 percent statistic was everywhere. It was like the statistic on women beaten by their husbands on Super Bowl Sunday.

CBS' Bob Schieffer asked Obama on "Face the Nation": "It's my understanding that 90 percent of the guns that they're getting down in Mexico are coming from the United States. We don't seem to be doing a very good job of cutting off the gun flow. Do you need any kind of legislative help on that front? Have you, for example, thought about asking Congress to reinstate the ban on assault weapons?"

At a Senate hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said: "It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico and used to shoot judges, police officers and mayors ... come from the United States."

And then, thanks to Fox News -- the first network to report it -- we found out the 90 percent figure was complete bunkum. It was a fabrication told by William Hoover, of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF), and then spread like wildfire by Democrats and the media.

Mexican law enforcement authorities send only a fraction of the guns they recover from criminals back to the U.S. for tracing. Which guns do they send? The guns that have U.S. serial numbers on them. It would be like asking a library to produce all their Mark Twain books and then concluding that 90 percent of the books in that library are by Mark Twain.

You begin to see why the left hates Fox News so much.

Obama backed away from the preposterous 90 percent claim. His National Security Council spokesman explained to Fox News that by "recovered," they meant "guns traceable to the United States." So, in other words, Democrats were frantically citing the amazing fact that almost all the guns traceable to the U.S. were ... traceable to the U.S.

Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters that even if the percentage is inaccurate, the "vast majority" of guns seized in crimes in Mexico come from the United States. And he should know, because it turns out he was sending them there!

Apart from the guns Holder was giving them, this was an absurd claim. Most of the guns used by drug cartels are automatic weapons -- not to mention shoulder-fired rockets -- that can't be sold to most Americans. They are acquired from places like Russia, China and Guatemala.

Right about the time the 90 percent lie was unraveling, the Obama administration decided to directly hand thousands of American guns over to Mexican criminals. Apart from the fact that tracking thousands of guns into Mexico is not feasible or rational, the dumped guns didn't have GPS tracing devices on them, anyway. There is no conceivable law enforcement objective to such a program.

This is what we know:

(1) Liberals thought it would be a great argument for gun control if American guns were ending up in the hands of Mexican criminals;

(2) They wanted that to be true so badly, Democrats lied about it;

(3) After they were busted on their lie, the Obama administration began dumping thousands of guns in the hands of Mexican criminals.

We also know that hundreds of people were murdered with these U.S.-government-supplied guns, including at least one American, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

But let's look on the bright side. The BATF was originally going to ship warheads to Iran until realizing the explosions might disable the tracking devices.

(Contrary to more Democrat lies, there was no such program to dump thousands of guns in Mexico under George W. Bush. The Bush administration did have a program that put GPS trackers on about 100 guns in order to actually trace them. That operation was ended almost as soon as it began because of the lack of cooperation from Mexican officials. You may as well say Holder's program was "started" by the first cop who ever put tracer dye on contraband.)

No one has explained what putting 2,500 untraceable guns in the hands of Mexican drug dealers was supposed to accomplish.

But you know what that might have accomplished? It would make the Democrats' lie retroactively true -- allowing them to push for the same gun restrictions they were planning when they first concocted it. A majority of guns recovered from Mexican criminals would, at last, be American guns, because Eric Holder had put them there.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, some brave whistleblower inside the government leaked details of this monstrous scheme. As soon as Congress and the public demanded answers, Holder clammed up. He just says "oops" -- and accuses Republicans of racism.

Source





Is Buying a Gun a Suicidal Act?

Americans often buy guns for self-defense, a purpose that now has Supreme Court validation. But according to advocates of gun control, those purchasers overlook the people who pose the greatest threat: themselves. Anyone who acquires a firearm, we are told, is inviting a bloody death by suicide.

So says Matthew Miller, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If you bought a gun today, I could tell you the risk of suicide to you and your family members is going to be two- to tenfold higher over the next 20 years," he told The Washington Post. Since the chance of a gun being used for suicide is so much higher than the chance of it being used to prevent a murder, we would all be better off with fewer firearms around.

It's a rich irony -- as though smoke alarms were increasing fire fatalities. But the argument raises two questions: Is it true? And, when it comes to gun control policy, does it matter?

As it turns out, the claims about guns and suicide don't stand up well to scrutiny. A 2004 report by the National Academy of Sciences was doubtful, noting that the alleged association is small and may be illusory.

Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck says there are at least 13 published studies finding no meaningful connection between the rate of firearms and the rate of suicides. The consensus of experts, he says, is that an increase in gun ownership doesn't raise the number of people who kill themselves -- only the number who do it with a gun.

That makes obvious sense. Someone who really wants to commit suicide doesn't need a .38, because alternative methods abound. Gun opponents, however, respond that guns inevitably raise the rate because they're uniquely lethal. Take away the gun, and you greatly increase the chance of survival.

But in his 1997 book, "Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control," Kleck points out that "suicide attempts with guns are only slightly more likely to end in death than those involving hanging, carbon monoxide poisoning, or drowning." It's not hard to think of some other pretty foolproof means of self-destruction -- such as jumping off a tall (or even not so tall) building, stepping in front of a train or driving at 80 mph into a telephone pole.

People who use guns are generally hellbent on ending their lives. So, deprived of a sidearm, they will no doubt find another reliable method -- rather than swallow a dozen aspirin and wake up in the emergency room. Banning guns is no more likely to reduce suicides than banning ice cream is to curb obesity.

A few decades ago, various European countries changed the type of natural gas used for home heating and cooking -- replacing a toxic form with a harmless variety. That step eliminated one time-tested way of killing oneself. Alas, while the number of gas suicides declined, in most of these countries, the death toll didn't.

The same pattern holds for guns. The National Academy of Sciences report noted that any link between firearms and suicides "is not found in comparisons across countries." The number of guns in a nation tells you nothing about its suicide rate.

But let's suppose science could establish that people who obtain firearms do indeed increase their death rate (or the death rate of their family members) from suicide. So what?

Buying a car may shorten your lifespan, since traffic accidents are a major killer. Building a backyard swimming pool creates a potential fatal hazard to you and your loved ones. But nobody says the government should interfere with such decisions.

Personal safety is a far more central matter of individual autonomy than those choices. A mentally stable person living in a crime-ridden neighborhood should be free to judge whether she's more at risk from street criminals than from a spell of intense depression.

Presumptuous paternalists argue that Americans should be deprived of guns because gun owners are their own worst enemies. A lot of Americans would reply: We can't trust ourselves, but we can trust you?

Source




OH:  Robbery suspect gets shot at gas pumps:  "An armed gunman who tried to rob a customer at a gas station wound up at Miami Valley Hospital after he was shot during a struggle with the intended victim.  A man in his late 20s to mid-30s was filling up his vehicle at the Marathon station, Main Street and Ridge Avenue, at about 5:30 p.m. when another man at the gas pumps pulled out a gun, Dayton Sgt. John Riegel told News Center 7.  A struggle ensued.  "During the struggle, the suspect had the gun taken away from him and was shot in the hand," Riegel said, noting that the bullet is believed to have gone through the assailant's hand. His injury was not life threatening and he was taken to the hospital."


MO: Police say  Man Charged with Murder Was Being Robbed as He Sold Marijuana:  "A University City teen killed Tuesday was robbing the man who shot him, according to St. Louis County Circuit Court documents.  University City Police said in the report that Shawn N. Lackland, 21,  provided a handgun to Eric Gray Jr, 16. Police said Lackland gave the handgun to Gray so he and Orlando McLamb-Rice, 19, could rob Otha Liggins, 23, of the 7400 block of Saleen, University City.  Liggins met Gray and Rice to selling them marijuana, according to court documents. During the attempted robbery in the rear of 1089 North Hanley, Liggins shot Gray in the head, killing him, police said.  Two weapons were recovered at the scene. One handgun was found next to Gray. The second handgun is believed to be the one used to shoot Gray."