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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28052 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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Operation Fast and Furious

In November 2009, the ATF’s Phoenix field office launched an operation in which guns bought by drug-cartel straw purchasers in the U.S. were allowed to “walk” across the border into Mexico. ATF agents would then track the guns as they made their way through the ranks of the cartel.

At least, that was the theory. In reality, once the guns walked across the border, they were gone. Whistleblowers reported, and investigators later confirmed, that the ATF made no effort to trace the guns.

Wikipedia page

Gunwalking, or "letting guns walk", was a tactic used by the Arizona U.S. Attorney's Office and the Arizona Field Office of the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which ran a series of sting operations between 2006 and 2011 in the Tucson and Phoenix area where the ATF "purposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders and arrest them". However, as of October 2011, none of the targeted high-level cartel figures had been arrested.

I'm surprised this wasn't immediately recognized, but I guess I'm old, and it was at the very start of the Obama administration.

Or, as my neighbor once said, Obama had a scandal-free presidency. He meant it as an indication that Obama behaved well while in office. I took that to mean that the media did not allow him to suffer from any scandals, including F&F gun running.

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