by the Night Writer

The Obama Administration has been saying over and over that 90 percent of the guns recovered from criminals in Mexico come from the U.S. Fox News has reported the actual total is 17 percent. According to an updated FactCheck.org report, however, they are both wrong by a significant margin.

Both numbers seemed rather far-fetched to me when I first heard them, but the FactCheck report looks like it has a pretty good handle on the facts and methodologies of what is a bit of a convoluted process to calculate. (FactCheck itself admits getting an incorrect answer its first time through). Here’s the skinny:

President Obama and Mexican president Calderon both said 90 percent of the guns recovered by Mexican authorities come from the U.S. SoS Hillary Clinton, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), Diane Feinstein (D-CA) repeated the figure (using the same teleprompter, perhaps?) and they’ve been faithfully echoed by the New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor and NBC who can’t afford calculators due to budget cuts. Their error — deliberate or inadvertent — is to leave out a few important words. What they should be saying is that 90 percent of guns recovered that the Mexican government submits for tracing can be traced back to the U.S. As Fox and others noted, Mexico only submits a percentage of the guns it recovers for tracing, mainly because most of the guns are untraceable. As FactCheck notes:

…Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora put the number of recovered crime weapons in the country over the past two years at nearly 29,000, according to USA Today. And figures given by ATF make clear that the agency doesn’t trace nearly all of those.

According to ATF, Mexico submitted 7,743 firearms for tracing in fiscal year 2008 (which ended Oct. 1) and 3,312 guns in fiscal 2007. That adds up to a fraction of the two-year total given by Mexico’s attorney general. He may be referring to a slightly different 24-month period, but that can’t account for more than a part of the discrepancy. The number is growing, and already this year, Mexico has submitted more than 7,500 guns for tracing, according to ATF. But even if all those guns are added in, the total submitted for tracing since the start of fiscal 2007 doesn’t come close to the 29,000 figure that Mexico says it has recovered.

While the Administration stumbles over words, Fox — deliberately or inadvertently — used the wrong number (based on confusing ATF testimony) to do its math. Fox said only 5,114 of the 29,000 recovered guns came through the U.S. Back to FactCheck:

The 5,114 figure is simply wrong. What Newell said quite clearly is that the number of guns submitted to ATF in those two years was 11,055: “3,312 in FY 2007 [and] 7,743 in FY 2008.” Newell also testified, as other ATF officials have done, that 90 percent of the guns traced were determined to have come from the U.S. So based on Newell’s testimony, the Fox reporters should have used a figure of 9,950 guns from U.S. sources. That figures out to just over 34 percent of guns recovered, assuming that the 29,000 figure supplied by Mexico’s attorney general is correct.

Even that number is too low. At our request, an ATF spokesman gave us more detailed figures for how many guns had been submitted and traced during those two years. Of the guns seized in Mexico and given to ATF for tracing, the agency actually found 95 percent came from U.S. sources in fiscal 2007 and 93 percent in fiscal 2008. That comes to a total of 10,347 guns from U.S. sources for those two years, or 36 percent of what Mexican authorities say they recovered.

Ok, 34-36 percent isn’t exactly a small number (unless you compare it to 90 percent). As other bloggers have noted, most of the guns used in Mexico are fully-automatic weapons which are not readily available in the U.S. but can be purchased, stolen or donated by other entities throughout Central and South America. Not that a shade-tree armorer couldn’t convert a U.S. semi-automatic AR-15 to automatic, but the drug gangs and cartels do have other options.

While it would be very nice if these guns didn’t cross the border (and kept prices down domestically) and some might say even 34 percent is horrific when innocent by-standers are being killed, the purchases are being made by criminals to use on other criminals. The Administration’s 90 percent chorus, however, seems like part of a plan to further complicate (if not outlaw) legal gun transactions for law-abiding citizens in the U.S.

Now that the numbers have been brought together and the math is out there it will be interesting to see if the Administration and Fox (and others) continue to use their incorrect numbers going forward, or if any other media will bother to do the math as part of the responsibility of a free press. Whatever numbers you see being used next will tell you a lot about the person or organization using them.

bookmark to: