Wrong again, and not Rico this time

Courtesy of my friend Bill Champ, this by William La Jeunesse and Maxim Lott of FoxNews.com, concerning the bad reporting about Mexico:

You've heard this shocking 'fact' before on television and radio, in newspapers, on the Internet, and from the highest politicians in the land: Ninety percent of the weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the United States.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it to reporters on a flight to Mexico City.
CBS newsman Bob Schieffer referred to it while interviewing President Obama.
California Senator Dianne Feinstein said at a Senate hearing: "It is unacceptable to have ninety percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico and used to shoot judges, police officers and mayors... come from the United States."
William Hoover, assistant director for field operations at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, testified in the House of Representatives that "there is more than enough evidence to indicate that over ninety percent of the firearms that have either been recovered in, or interdicted in transport to Mexico, originated from various sources within the United States."

There's just one problem with the ninety percent 'statistic' and it's a big one: it's just not true. In fact, it's not even close. The fact is, only seventeen percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the US.
What's true, an ATF spokeswoman said, in a clarification of the statistic used by her own agency's assistant director, "is that over ninety percent of the traced firearms originate from the US."
But a large percentage of the guns recovered in Mexico do not get sent back to the US for tracing, because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the US. "Not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the US market," Matt Allen, special agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said.
In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Close to 6,000 were successfully traced and of those, ninety percent— 5,114 to be exact, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover— were found to have come from the US. But in those same two years, according to the Mexican government, 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes. 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 US.
So, if not from the United States, where do they come from? There are a variety of sources:
Mexico is a virtual arms bazaar, with fragmentation grenades from South Korea, AK47s from China, and shoulder-fired rocket launchers from Spain, Israel, and former Soviet bloc manufacturers.
Interpol says Russian groups such as Poldolskaya and the Moscow-based Solntsevskaya are actively trafficking drugs and arms in Mexico.
During the late 1990s, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia established a clandestine arms smuggling and drug trafficking partnership with the Tijuana cartel, according to the Federal Research Division report from the Library of Congress.
According to a 2006 Amnesty International Report, China has provided arms to countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Chinese assault weapons and Korean explosives have been recovered in Mexico.
More than 150,000 Mexican soldiers deserted in the last six years, according to Mexican Congressman Robert Badillo. Many took their weapons with them, including their standard-issue M16 assault rifles, made in Belgium.
Intelligence agencies say traffickers move immigrants, stolen cars, guns, and drugs, including most of America's cocaine, along the porous Mexican-Guatemalan border. On 27 March La Hora, a Guatemalan newspaper, reported that police seized 500 grenades and a load of AK47s on the border. Police say the cache was transported by a Mexican drug cartel operating out of Ixcan, a border town.
Ed Head, a firearms instructor in Arizona who spent 24 years with the US Border Patrol, recently displayed an array of weapons considered "assault rifles" that are similar to those recovered in Mexico, but are unavailable for sale in the US. "These kinds of guns, the auto versions of these guns, they are not coming from El Paso," he said. "They are coming from other sources. They are brought in from Guatemala. They are brought in from places like China. They are being diverted from the military. But you don't get these guns from the US." Some guns, he said, "are legitimately shipped to the government of Mexico, by Colt, for example, in the United States. They are approved by the US government for use by the Mexican military service. The guns end up in Mexico that way, the full auto versions, they are not smuggled in across the river."
Many of the fully automatic weapons that have been seized in Mexico cannot be found in the US, but they are not uncommon in the Third World. The Mexican government said it has seized 2,239 grenades in the last two years, but grenades and rocket-propelled grenades are unavailable in US gun shops. The ones used in an attack on the US consulate in Monterrey in October and a television station in January were made in South Korea. Almost seventy similar grenades were seized in February in the bottom of a truck entering Mexico from Guatemala. "Most of these weapons are being smuggled from Central American countries or by sea, eluding US and Mexican monitors who are focused on the smuggling of semi-automatic and conventional weapons purchased from dealers in the border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California," according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.
So why would the Mexican drug cartels, which last year grossed between $17 billion and $38 billion, bother buying single-shot rifles, and force thousands of unknown "straw" buyers in the U.S. through a government background check, when they can buy boatloads of fully automatic M16s and assault rifles from China, Israel, or South Africa?
Alberto Islas, a security consultant who advises the Mexican government, says the drug cartels are using the Guatemalan border to move black market weapons. Some are left over from the Central American wars the United States helped fight; others, like the grenades and launchers, are South Korean, Israeli, and Spanish. Some were legally supplied to the Mexican government; others were sold by corrupt military officers or officials.
The exaggeration of United States "responsibility" for the lawlessness in Mexico extends even beyond the '90-percent' falsehood, and some Second Amendment activists believe it's designed to promote more restrictive gun-control laws in the US.
In a remarkable claim, Auturo Sarukhan, Mexican ambassador to the United States, said Mexico seizes 2,000 guns a day from the United States, or 730,000 a year. That's a far cry from the official statistic from the Mexican attorney general's office, which says Mexico seized 29,000 weapons in all of 2007 and 2008.
Chris Cox, spokesman for the National Rifle Association, blames the media and anti-gun politicians in the U.S. for misrepresenting where Mexican weapons come from. "Reporter after politician after news anchor just disregards the truth on this," Cox said. "The numbers are intentionally used to weaken the Second Amendment. The predominant source of guns in Mexico is Central and South America. You also have Russian, Chinese, and Israeli guns. It's estimated that over 100,000 soldiers deserted the army to work for the drug cartels, and that ignores all the police. How many of them took their weapons with them?"
But Tom Diaz, senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, called the "90 percent" issue a red herring and said that it should not detract from the effort to stop gun trafficking into Mexico. "Let's do what we can with what we know," he said. "We know that one hell of a lot of firearms come from the United States because our gun market is wide open."

Rico says the anti-gun folks will do or say anything to promote their position...