Figures Lie and Liars Figure
Second Amendment 
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The joint U.S.-Mexico task force on border issues has, entirely predictably, returned a recommendation to reinstate the federal “assault weapons” ban:
A binational task force on U.S.-Mexico border issues will call Friday on the Obama administration and Congress to reinstate an expired ban on assault weapons and for Mexico to overhaul its frontier police and customs agencies to mirror the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Why? Because:
Mexican officials want a ban, saying that 90 percent of guns seized in drug crimes in Mexico and submitted for tracing to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives originate in the United States, including most assault rifles.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that’s true, and the notoriously corrupt Mexican government isn’t simply making things up to deflect from the incompetence and graft endemic in its own ranks. Note the language used in the article: “90 percent of guns seized in drug crimes in Mexico and submitted for tracing” (emphasis mine). I’ve talked about tracing before, in my post about the Tiarht Amendment. The universe of traced guns is not a statistically-valid sample from which to draw any conclusions about the larger universe of untraced guns, for the simple reasons that (a) not every criminal investigation results in a trace, and (b) not every trace is for a criminal investigation. Is the Mexican government requesting traces for 100% of the guns seized in drug crimes? We don’t know, and that fact alone makes the article’s “90%” statistic a load of codswallop.
And, of course, this is to say nothing of the constitutional issues involved, nor to point out that there’s no evidence so-called “assault weapons” are disproportionately dangerous or used in a disproportionate number of crimes.
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