As bad as Fast And Furious seems to be, and it is bad, there is worse news on the American-guns-to-Mexican-drug-dealers front. CBS News is reporting that thousands more guns than the nearly 2,000 “lost” by the BATF with Operation Fast and Furious has been lost through legal gun sales to the Mexican government.

Sheryl Attkisson recently discovered that guns sold by American manufacturers that have been selling guns legally to the Mexican government through official State Department channels are ending up in the hands of the drug cartels at an unfortunately large rate.

It isn’t the gun manufacturer’s fault, either. These fully automatic guns are being sold legally to the Mexican police and the Mexican army and the sales were signed off on by the State Dept. But apparently what is happening is that with the hundreds of thousands of Mexican soldiers and policemen going AWOL to join the drug cartels many high-end military firearms are being taken with those defectors right into the arsenals of the drug dealers.

Attkisson has also discovered that some of these firearms legally sold to Mexican authorities have ended up back in America in the hands of drug dealers and cartel soldiers.

But before we go assuming that the government is all innocent and that all the lawbreaking is being done by Mexicans, here, we do have a coverup of sorts being perpetrated by the Obama administration. The problem that Attkisson discovered is that the administration has quietly stopped their racking and reporting procedures so that we have a sense of how many of these guns are ending up in the hands of narco-terrorists. Now the government won’t even tell us how many guns they are selling to Mexico so that we can judge the rate of loss.

Attkisson also notes that the number of guns being sold by the Obama administration has risen precipitously, too. So the number of missing guns is climbing.

And it did approve 2,476 guns to be sold to Mexico in 2006. In 2009, that number was up nearly 10 times, to 18,709. The State Department has since stopped disclosing numbers of guns it approves, and wouldn’t give CBS News figures for 2010 or 2011.

With Mexico in a virtual state of war with its cartels, nobody’s tracking how many U.S. guns are ending up with the enemy.
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The State Department audits only a tiny sample – less than 1 percent of sales – but the results are disturbing: In 2009, more than a quarter (26 percent) of the guns sold to the region that includes Mexico were “diverted” into the wrong hands, or had other “unfavorable” results.

Wow. A 26 percent loss rate of the guns being sold to Mexican authorities is huge! And we were worried at some 2,000 missing guns from the illicit Fast and Furious! This means we have several times that missing from the legal sales!

Holy-moley!