by Jeff Davis

The Houston Chronicle reports “In front of a run-down shack in north Houston, federal agents step from a government sedan into 102-degree heat and face a critical question: How can the woman living here buy four high-end handguns in one day? The house is worth $35,000. A screen dangles by a wall-unit air conditioner. Porch swing slats are smashed, the smattering of grass is flattened by cars and burned yellow by sun. Success on the front lines of a government blitz on gunrunners supplying Mexican drug cartels with Houston weaponry hinges on logging heavy miles and knocking on countless doors. Dozens of agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — sent here from around the country — are needed to follow what ATF acting director Kenneth Melson described as a massive number of investigative leads. All told, Mexican officials in 2008 asked federal agents to trace the origins of more than 7,500 firearms recovered at crime scenes in Mexico. Most of them were traced back to Texas, California and Arizona.”

Do you begin to see another one of the gun-grabbing excuses that the Obama regime will use when it seeks a rationale for revoking the Second Amendment? Namely, that legal gun sales are allegedly arming organized crime in this country and others. Never mind the fact that an AK47 can be bought in many parts of the world for a bunch of bananas or a sack of wheat. We are supposed to believe that large numbers of legally purchased guns are being sold by little old ladies in America to Mexican drug thugs. The drug lords couldn’t possibly use their hundreds of millions in drug profits to pay a smuggler to bring in a load of fully automatic weapons. Instead, they would rather purchase one or two guns at a time from individual Americans as the BATF is claiming.

The Chronicle notes “Among other things, the agents are combing neighborhoods and asking people about suspicious purchases as well as seeking explanations as to how their guns ended up used in murders, kidnappings and other crimes in Mexico. The ATF recently dispatched 100 veteran agents to its Houston division, which reaches to the border. The mission is especially challenging because, officials say, that while Houston is the number one point of origin for weapons traced back to the United States from Mexico, the government can’t compile databases on gun owners under federal law.”

So they’re effectively telling us that we must change the law and allow the BATF to register guns on the federal level. Gee, what a surprise: A ginned up problem that no one ever heard of before. How much would you like to bet that at least half of the gun purchases in the US by “Mexican drug runners” are really sting operations by the BATF?

It’s very hard to believe that Joe Sixpack would buy guns for obvious criminals. As soon as the first illegally transferred gun turns up in a police bust, then Joe Sixpack is going to jail. Are a few hundred dollars in profit from an illegal gun sale worth the looming chance of prison? Maybe the BATF is really hoping to harass all those Americans who stocked up on guns fearing an Obama dictatorship. Suddenly, buying four guns makes you a potential “illegal gun dealer” instead of an American who is worried about future chaos.

Right now the BATF is honing their skills allegedly looking for gun dealers supplying Mexican drug gangs. They will eventually apply these skills to tracking down law-abiding American gun owners, as soon as the Democrats can get the necessary legislation in place. It’s the usual liberal salami-slicing tactic: A tiny minority of criminals or lunatics abuse a Right, and therefore according to liberal logic, everyone must lost that Right for “public safety reasons.”