As You Might Guess, Fortune Is Full of Crap

So Fortune Magazine has a piece out on an investigation regarding Fast & Furious in which it basically decides Fast & Furious never actually happened.  Never mind the numerous whistle blowers.  Never mind the fact that the Department of Justice admits that guns were allowed to walk.  Never mind that their primary sources are subjects of the House Oversight Committee's investigation.  No, they have found the Truth!

Except they haven't.  New Republic Online, posted this response which (by the time I found it) included this update:

UPDATE: A spokesman from the House Oversight Committee sends along this response to the story:

Fortune’s story is a fantasy made up almost entirely from the accounts of individuals involved in the reckless tactics that took place in Operation Fast and Furious.  It contains factual errors — including the false statement that Chairman Issa has called for Attorney General Holder’s resignation — and multiple distortions. It also hides critical information from readers — including a report in the Wall Street Journal — indicating that its primary sources may be facing criminal charges. Congressional staff gave Fortune Magazine numerous examples of false statements made by the story’s primary source and the magazine did not dispute this information. It did not, however, explain this material to its readers. The one point of agreement the Committee has with this story is its emphasis on the role Justice Department prosecutors, not just ATF agents, played in guns being transferred to drug cartels in Mexico. The allegations made in the story have been examined and rejected by congressional Republicans, Democrats, and the Justice Department.

But that's not what I'm going to focus on.  Of course their story is false, there is no way the Obama Administration would have spent this much political capitol and allowed this to become so big a scandal if there really was no "there" there.

No, I think it's enlightening to look at the beginning of the story.  You see, to someone who is paying attention, it's easy to see what they were going to 'discover,' just from reading their introduction.  It's such anti-gun drivel, I almost expected to read about how many accidental shooting deaths there were in Arizona last year (as though that would have had anything to do with Fast & Furious- but that's the kind of "logic" they're using).

Early on they set up the piece as anti-gun.

No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking, so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws.

Again, in the same paragraph:

The National Rifle Association has so successfully opposed a comprehensive electronic database of gun sales that the ATF's congressional appropriation explicitly prohibits establishing one.

The two paragraphs on:

Voth's mandate was to stop gun traffickers in Arizona, the state ranked by the gun-control advocacy group Legal Community Against Violence as having the nation's "weakest gun violence prevention laws." Just 200 miles from Mexico, which prohibits gun sales, the Phoenix area is home to 853 federally licensed firearms dealers. Billboards advertise volume discounts for multiple purchases.

And the next:

Customers can legally buy as many weapons as they want in Arizona as long as they're 18 or older and pass a criminal background check.

And it continues from there.  It is quite obvious that the author has an anti-gun agenda, and is unlikely to allow mere facts to get in his way.

The problem?  The very premise on which he basis his article is the basis for Fast and Furious:

The Mexican government has estimated that 2,000 weapons are smuggled daily from the U.S. into Mexico.

And it's one for which no one has ever actually found any evidence. Indeed, it is more expensive and problematic to purchase guns in the United States and smuggle them to Mexico than it is to purchase them on the black market.  For one thing, your black market gun dealer will deliver to you- they're the Dominoes of firearms.  For another, a black market gun dealer can provide automatic weapons, whereas smuggling guns in from the United States limits you to semi-automatic weapons.

Why would I pay more for a gun that I had to go pick up that would not be as effective? 

The answer:  I wouldn't.  Indeed, from what we think we know (much of this is still hidden) it appears that the US Government not only allowed the guns to walk without taking any steps to track or interdict them, but that they actually subsidized the purchases to convince the Cartels to buy the weapons.

This was not a gun trafficking operation.  It was not even really about the Second Amendment.  Fast and Furious was an Act of War against the government of Mexico.