Operation Fast and Furious

No it’s not a movie about tuner cars and illegal street racing where an undercover agent infiltrates the clandestine world of turbochargers and nitrous oxide. This is a real-world operation about infiltrating the gunrunners along the Mexican border. Vince Cefalu, an ATF agent, blew the whistle on this operation after a Border Agent was gunned down. The Border Agent, Brian Terry, wasn’t shot in a botched gun-trading incident. No, he was gunned down by one of the very guns that the U.S. government had sold to Mexican cartels in an effort to track the weapons. Two AK-47s that were part of Operation Fast and Furious were recovered at the scene of the shooting in Rio Rico, Arizona where Terry was attempting to apprehend a group of gunrunners.

In April of 2009, while visiting Felipe Cauldron in Mexico, President Obama said he wanted to renew a ban on some semiautomatic weapons but that it is not likely to pass Congress. Instead, he called for the Senate to ratify a hemisphere-wide treaty that would require nations to mark all weapons produced in the country and track them to make sure no weapons were exported to countries where they were banned. That sounds reasonable considering our neighbors have both banned firearms.

The ATF seems to have taken this idea as a way to track the guns once they were in Mexico. Just like throwing money at the economic crisis, our government decided to throw guns at the violence in Mexico. Might as well throw some liquid hydrogen on the wildfires near Los Alamos while we’re at it and save the liquid dihydrogen monoxide for the flooding in the Mid West.

Here’s the real worrisome part. The anti-gun culture here in the U.S. is claiming that a large number of guns being used in the war in Mexico have come from the U.S. and that we should ban guns here and get rid of the second amendment. Seeing that most of those guns were likely sold by the U.S. government, maybe we should strip the government of its rights to have weapons. Of course the likely rebuttal to that proposition would be that they need their weapons to protect us, thus the double entendre is that the people can’t protect themselves with their own guns.

While it is still too early to say, with certainty, that Eric Holder perjured himself before a congressional hearing about the Executive approval for Operation Fast and Furious I would be hard pressed to believe that an operation like this wasn’t signed off by the executive. Maybe it was the U.N. that authorized it. After all they approved our new war in Libya and threatened Texas over the execution of a rapist. But that usurpation of power is a whole other story from the District of Caesars…er…Columbia.

The fate of the whistleblower, ATF agent Vince Cefalu? He's been served his termination paperwork. That's the transparency and whistleblower-protection that Obama promised.