by Dave Workman | Senior Editor
More than three years after they were purchased by two different people at the same Arizona gun shop, three rifles that were part of the disastrous Operation Fast and Furious have been recovered at Mexican crime scenes.
CBS News first broke the story, noting that two of the rifles were bought in May and July of 2010 by gun running suspect Uriel Patino, who purchased hundreds of guns during the ill-fated gun running sting operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
After the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in December 2010 and the recovery of two Fast & Furious guns there, the scandal broke due to the work of National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea and independent Sipsey Street Irregulars blogger Mike Vanderboegh.
The investigation blew up during 2011, with congressional hearings before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the resignations of former US Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke and removal of then-acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson. Ultimately, those involved directly with the operation were fired, transferred or resigned from their positions with the ATF or Justice Department.
It was during one of those House committee hearings that ATF Special Agent Carlos Canino, then attaché to Mexico, called Fast and Furious “a perfect storm of idiocy.” Attorney General Eric Holder was held in Contempt of Congress in 2012; an historic event because it was the first time such a citation had been issued to an attorney general and Holder is the first African-American to serve in that position.
President Barack Obama invoked executive privilege so Holder would not have to surrender thousands of subpoenaed documents to the Oversight Committee, chaired by Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA). That move is being challenged in court.
By some estimates, as many as 2,500 guns were allowed to “walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartel criminals under Fast and Furious. Most of those firearms are still unaccounted for, and they have been showing up at crime scenes for the past three years.
The “gun walking” scandal was used by the ATF to justify special regulations on the sale of multiple long guns in four southwest states, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
Patino is one of the more prolific suspects in the gun trafficking operation, having purchased firearms in November and December 2009, and January, February, March, April, May and July the following year. Many of those guns were purchased at the same gun shop in Arizona, including the two linked to him that were recently recovered. According to some estimates, he may have purchased as many as 700 guns during the course of the flawed sting operation.
Those rifles were all WASR models chambered for the 7.62x39mm round, and seem to be among the favorite gun models. Critics of the ATF operation have predicted that those guns will continue to show up for years to come. At least one Fast and Furious gun was recovered at the scene of a gun battle that took the life of a Mexican beauty queen.
