Radio pundit Rush Limbaugh has this take on Operation Fast and Furious:
“It was a backdoor way to curtail the Second Amendment. … Get American guns, guns from American gun stores in the hands of Mexican drug cartels who would then use them in marauders and massacres and murders, other acts of violence … they arrange a program that is designed to put guns purchased in Arizona in American gun stores in the hands of drug cartel thugs in Mexico. They figure that those guns are gonna be used in the commission of crimes, murders, mayhem, and what have you. The plan was to have that happen, and then to have outrage and shock and dismay when we learn that those guns originated in the Phoenix! … They wanted a national outcry of opposition to this, shut down the availability of guns. That was the whole point of Fast and Furious”.
For those of you unclear about Operation Fast and Furious, here’s the gist of it:
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) allowed thousands of guns to be purchased in the U.S. and smuggled into Mexico by gun traffickers. The idea was to track the gun smugglers to the criminal organizations that would end up using the guns. However, many of the guns wound up being used in violent crimes, including the murders of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in 2010, and U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement Special Agent Jaime Zapata in 2011.
Now, law enforcement sometimes does “sting” operations involving the transfer of guns or illegal narcotics. And sometimes they let the drugs or guns “walk” — that is, leave government possession — for the sake of following it further up a criminal organization’s chain of command. It’s always a risk to do that. And, clearly, the ATF failed to manage that risk, here, with tragic consequences.
Limbaugh and others, though, say that this was no mistake. They believe that the Obama administration intentionally allowed the guns to fall into the hands of criminals so that the ensuing violence would convince U.S. citizens to support stronger gun control laws.
There’s two problems with this:
First of all, how do you prove that you don’t have a hidden motive? It’s like Janeane Garofalo’s recent claim that Republicans, conservatives, and the Tea Party are supporting a black man — Herman Cain — to keep their racism “covert”. If you’re going to impugn someone’s motives, you have to come up with real evidence of malicious intent, not just baseless assertions.
But, more to the point, how would this plan have worked? It’s clear that a lot of people in the ATF knew these guns were being allowed to walk. Did the Obama administration think that all of them would be quiet? If anyone in the Obama administration were to argue that the gun violence highlighted the need for greater restrictions on firearms in the U.S., they had to know that these ATF agents would stand up and say, “No, this isn’t a result of permissive gun laws, it’s a result of lax enforcement. We could have stopped this violence if we’d enforced the existing laws.” If this was the Obama administration’s plan, they had to know it would fall apart immediately.
Certainly the operation was handled incompetently. And there may be an issue of a coverup, too boot, as some people — in particular, Attorney General Eric Holder — may not have been honest about their knowledge of Operation Fast and Furious.
But the scenario Limbaugh outlines involves both malice and incompetence. As Occam’s razor says, the simplest solution is the best. Why invoke sinister incompetence as an explanation for Operation Fast and Furious when just regular old incompetence will do?