By DAN GIFFORD AND MICHAEL I. KRAUSS | Posted Tuesday, July 07, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Big lies die slowly. After a claim by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that 90% of Mexican drug dealers' military weapons (machine guns, hand grenades and missiles) come from American gun stores was exposed as a lie several months ago, it's back — this time with the imprimatur of the Government Accountability Office.
A June 21 CBS "60 Minutes" report by Anderson Cooper was clearly coordinated to coincide with release of the GAO report and a similar one by "activist" Josh Sugarmann.
You are likely to soon hear and read that the GAO report commissioned by Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., confirms what Mexico's attorney general, Eduardo Medina-Mora, told Cooper: "Two thousand two hundred grenades, missile and rocket launchers!"
Cue Cooper as a video of machine guns, hand grenades and other weaponry fill the screen: "It turns out 90% of them are purchased in the U.S."
That's not all. You will hear from Sugarmann that Mexican drug dealers are buying FN Herstal Five-seven pistols from licensed U.S. gun merchants because those pistols fire bullets that penetrate protective body armor.
What you are unlikely to hear and read is that all such military weapons are illegal in the U.S., that Mexican criminals are supplied through an international black market and that this black market prominently features weapons the U.S. sold to the Mexican military and that are resold to drug cartels by corrupt Mexican officials.
Neither are you likely to hear or read that the vest-penetrating ammunition made for the FN Herstal Five-seven is available only to military and special police units.
The facts don't matter. Reinstatement of the federal "assault weapon" ban that lapsed in 2004 matters, and is nothing short of a fetish among powerful supporters who will tell almost any untruth to achieve it.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she would pick the time and place to ram the ban through. The foundation work for her plan includes TV face time for renewal activists, and politicians and law enforcement organizations that will get larger budgets and more power if the ban is reinstated.
Journalists don't always repeat these lies in bad faith. Often they publish untruths as a combination of journalistic ignorance of firearm features and laws, and anti-gun loathing common to the "metrosexual" class.
Canadian-born Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer admitted as much before the first "assault weapon" ban went into effect in 1994:
"The 'assault weapons ban' will have no effect either on the crime rate or on personal security. . . . Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of (all) weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation."
Last year's Supreme Court ruling in Heller v. D.C. that the Second Amendment right to own firearms is an individual one may crimp confiscation plans, but the current set of lies being told in order to achieve renewed restrictions goes on.
Savvy operators like Sugarmann have told them for years. "Assault weapon" is a military term Sugarmann and others intentionally misapply to civilian firearms to frighten the public and play on its ignorance.
As Sugarmann himself told supporters in 1988: "The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns vs. semiautomatic 'assault' weapons — anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun — can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons."
Among previous Sugarmann inventions are the "plastic gun" and "cop-killer bullet" scares. In the former case, Sugarmann claimed that plastic guns able to evade detection by metal detectors were being sold — but no such gun existed or can be made.
In the second case, he asserted that handgun ammunition was being expressly manufactured to kill police officers. Reporters and politicians ate it up; yet there has never been any such thing as a cop-killer bullet, notes David Kopel, research director at the Independence Institute:
"The issue is a fiction, invented for purposes of politics. . . . In any case, since 1986, federal law has prohibited the rare types of handgun ammunition that have unusual abilities to penetrate body armor."
Are individuals smuggling guns into Mexico? Yes, just as they are smuggling cigarettes into Canada. Gun smuggling has been going on since the 1800s, in no small part due to Mexico's prohibitive gun laws.
But the guns going to Mexico are legal American firearms, not war materiel. The news media have knowingly or incompetently lied to Americans in service of a political cause. For this they should be deeply ashamed.
Gifford is an Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated film producer and a former reporter for ABC News, the "MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour" and CNN.
Krauss is a professor of law at George Mason University.
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