Myth:90 percent

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The 90% Myth or, perhaps more accurately, the 90% Lie, is an argument used by gun grabbers in an effort to blame legal gun sales in the United States for the current epidemic of violence in Mexico being perpetrated by an assortment of large drug cartels. It is primarily used as an appeal to reinstate ineffective gun laws that expired in 2004. The claim — still active among the less informed or serially dishonest — officially became a myth during congressional testimony in July 2009 when Bill McMahon, deputy assistant director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, revealed the eight percent figure, how it was calculated, and where the 90 percent myth arose from.

But anti-gun politicians rarely miss a chance to call for more control even if the laws are proven failures, and the administration found the 90 percent claim to be a useful cudgel. It was also a complete, utter, and demonstrable lie.

The myth

"As much as 90 percent of the assault weapons and other guns used by Mexican drug cartels are coming from the United States, fueling drug-related violence that is believed to have killed more than 7,000 people since January 2008, according to estimates by Mexican and U.S. law enforcement officials."

Both Mexican President Felipe Calderón and American President Barack Obama have tried to claim that 90 percent of the firearms used by Mexican drug cartels originate in the United States. These claims have been echoed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder and his assistants, liberal members of both houses of Congress, and a reliably anti-gun media. They hoped to use the shocking statistic to lay the groundwork for a reinstatement of the 1994 “assault weapons” ban that expired in 2004.

The facts

• only eight percent of weapons recovered in Mexico came through licensed U.S. gun dealers [1]

William La Jeunesse and Maxim Lott of Fox News were among the first to puncture the myth. They revealed that the 90 percent figure came from the number of guns that the Mexican authorities turned over to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Ninety percent of the firearms turned over to the ATF were determined to be from the United States.

But only a fraction of the guns recovered by the Mexican authorities were turned over to the ATF, because most of the weapons recovered had markings that clearly identified their origins in other countries. Of nearly 100,000 weapons recovered from the cartels, only 20 percent had been turned over to the U.S. for identification, and a total of 18,000 were determined to have been manufactured, sold, or imported from the United States.

Instead of 90 percent, the actual number of weapons recovered in Mexico that came from the U.S. was just 18 percent, and of those 18,000, just 7,900 came from sales by licensed gun dealers. Eight percent is a far cry from the 90 percent that the administration had been wanting to claim, and considering that there are more than 6,600 licensed dealers in the border region, it means (statistically speaking) just over one gun per licensed dealer has found it’s way across the border. And most of those were done with the collusion of the ATF.

See also

• Project Gunrunner