Vin Suprynowicz

Univision, the largest Spanish-language network in the U.S., aired a lengthy report on the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” Mexican gun-running operation on Sept. 30.

Gerardo Reyes and Santiago Wills offer an English-language version at http://tinyurl.com/9jdp2gh:

“On January 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez,” the men report. “Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers. Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape. Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded before the hit men finally fled.

“Indirectly, the United States government played a role in the massacre by supplying some of the firearms used by the cartel murderers,” Reyes and Wills report.

In fact, Univision identified a total of 57 more previously unreported firearms that were bought by straw purchasers monitored by ATF during Operation Fast and Furious and then recovered in Mexico in sites related to murders, kidnappings, and at least one other massacre.

As part of Operation Fast and Furious, the ATF allowed 1,961 guns to “walk” out of the U.S. in an effort to identify the high profile cartel leaders who received them, the network reported. “The agency eventually lost track of the weapons, and they often ended up in the hands of Mexican hit men. …”

At first glance, it would appear to be good news that Spanish-speaking viewers have finally gotten a full explanation of the “Fast and Furious” scandal, five weeks before the presidential election. But how complete was the Univision report?

At the American Thinker web site, M. Catherine Evans wrote on Oct. 3 “Univision Leaves Out Key Facts on Fast and Furious Cover-up.”

The investigators failed to focus on Attorney General Eric Holder’s contempt of Congress charge for refusing to hand over 70,000 to 80,000 documents requested by the House Oversight Committee, she points out. Nor did they report on President Obama’s move to protect his Attorney General by declaring Executive Privilege for the documents on the same day.

“The one-hour special also ignored top officials laying out their goals for a gun walking operation in 2009,” Evans reports. It was the March 24, 2009 press conference — after George W. Bush left office, just for the record — “which introduced the administration’s comprehensive plan to ‘take the fight to the drug cartels.’ … Why would the hard-hitting Univision report leave that out?”

At the conference, Deputy Attorney General David Ogden clearly stated “under the President’s leadership” he and Attorney General Holder were taking “new and aggressive” steps to “target Mexican trafficking” using $10 million in Recovery Act funds.

Combine Ogden’s claim to be operating “under the President’s leadership” with Mr. Obama’s last-minute invocation of executive privilege this past June, and you get a “time-line of a cover-up leading straight to the Oval office,” Evans asserts.

“The hope was Univision would do what our own corrupted press refuses to do — connect Obama, Ogden, Holder and the rest of the cabal in D.C. to Fast and Furious. Instead, intermingled in the graphic accounts of more guns traced to the Phoenix operation, were jabs at the number of gun stores on the Mexican-American border.”

For the record, there should be no ATF and there should be no American “gun laws.” We still have a Second Amendment, which bars any infringement, period. If Mexicans are buying guns and hauling them home to kill competitors in the drug trade, the answer is for Mexico — and the United States, if the move is to be fully effective — to re-legalize all commerce in marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc.

Drug gangs used to commit drive-by tommy-gunnings in Chicago, too — until 1933, when alcohol was re-legalized, whereupon that kind of violence disappeared overnight.

That said, however, legitimate gun stores near the Texas and Arizona borders report that when they called the ATF a few years back, reporting “I’ve got a suspicious character here who wants me to break the rules on a multiple-weapons sale; I’ll keep him busy while you send someone down to arrest him,” the BATF agents didn’t reply, “Ho ho, it was just a test and you pass with flying colors, Mr. Store Owner.” No. Instead, Mr. Holder’s boys told the store owners to go ahead and complete the sale — the federals were going to trace these weapons and find out where they went.

But why? Any Mexican cop or newspaperman could tell you the names of the people currently in charge of Mexico’s three largest drug cartels — and their financial links to many politicians currently in power there. No “tracing” operation was needed — assuming we wanted to send in an army to arrest said gangsters (it would take an army), which we evidently don’t.

So it’s hard to imagine any real “point” but to see to it that a lot more firearms “traceable to American gun stores” ended up “found at Mexican crime scenes,” the better to provide a new impetus for more “gun control” — exactly the logic the Sept. 30 Univision special seems to embrace.

Democratic politicians have been lying for years, claiming a huge majority of “guns found at crime scenes” south of the border came from American gun stores, when that’s never been the case.

See Ann Coulter’s June 27 column, “The Biggest Scandal in U.S. History,” which followed Fox News in debunking this nonsense. “This was an absurd claim” in the first place, Ms. Coulter points out, since “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.”

The ATF “lost track” of the weapons? How on earth did they ever plan to KEEP track of the weapons?

Why should we have any trouble believing the gun-hating Obama administration launched an operation designed to retroactively turn their erroneous reports about “American weapons found at Mexican crime scenes” into true reports — especially when President Obama, far from trying to get to the bottom of all this, has channeled Richard Nixon and invoked “executive privilege” to prevent Congress from learning the truth?