Hillary’s Assault on the Second Amendment

Here's an interesting read. You may recall the Secretary of State's comments recently that implied that Mexico's running gun battles between druggies and federal police is the fault of the United States. She pointed out that she believed that firearms were being smuggled into Mexico from the U.S., presumably because of our "lax" firearm laws. From the cited article:

The guns that are sold in the United States, which are illegal in Mexico, get smuggled over 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. So we've got to help out here. We can't stand by and say, Well, you know, you guys just do the best you can, when we, unfortunately, are the market for drugs, when a lot of the money is laundered in the United States back into the hands of the drug kingpins, and when the weapons have come from our country. So I think recognizing the co-responsibility is just stating the obvious.

This is the second article I've read that point out the glaringly obvious errors in the position that the United States is the source of smuggled firearms. It seems that everyone has overlooked a simple fact: the government of the United States sells firearms to the government of Mexico. What's a more readily-available source of firearms? Privately smuggled firearms, or the cache of weapons available to a corrupt government, or perhaps the fact that other sources exist for black-market military-grade weapons?

William Hoover, assistant director of field operations at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, argues that no such volume of American-made weapons are headed south. Says Hoover, “The investigations we have, that we see, for firearms flowing across the border don’t show us individuals taking thousands of guns a day or at a time flowing into Mexico.” His claim is buttressed by the fact that Mexican authorities have refused to provide U.S. law-enforcement officials with the serial numbers of weapons confiscated from drug cartel members—a likely indicator that the weapons were obtained not from American gun shops but rather from illegitimate sources elsewhere.

It might escape notice that full-auto firearms, rocket launchers, grenade launchers and grenades are not readily available to the U.S. buying public. So where did these firearms come from? Venezuela, I'm looking at you. Why would the drug cartels finance a smuggling operation when they could easily (and cheaply) buy weaponry from other sources?

So why all the hyperbole blaming the U.S. for this problem? Surely the Obama administration doesn't have an anti-gun agenda, does it?