"90% of the drug cartel weapons were purchased in the US..."
So say a number of politicians. But like any good statistic, one should really look a bit deeper at the numbers. When does 17% become 90%? Perhaps when someone has an agenda. To whit:
* In 2007-2008 Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing (according to ATF Special Agent William Newell)
* Close to 6,000 were successfully traced, and of those, 90 percent (5,114 to be exact) were found to have come from the U.S (according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover). So there is your magic "90%" figure that has become a rallying cry.
* But that means that the other 6,000 or so weapons that weren't traced likely did not come from the US. Usually they are not traced because the markings make it obvious that they are not from the US (so no reason/ability to trace). 90% now becomes 46%.
* But in those same two years, according to the Mexican government, 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes. Only a subset were submitted to the US, presumably those weapons that Mexico thought *might* have a US source.
* In other words, 68 percent of the guns that were recovered were never submitted for tracing. And when you weed out the roughly 6,000 guns that could not be traced from the remaining 32 percent, it means 83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S. So now 90% becomes 17%.
An inconvenient truth, perhaps? Admittedly the 17% figure could be higher as certain assumptions were made. But at least this points out all the factors. The original "90%" number does not attempt to be genuine, and is never qualified with what the number really means.
