The plan was simple – sell semi-automatic weapons to illegal gun runners, track the guns that will most likely end up in the hands of Mexican drug cartel members, then bust the cartel. Instead, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) lost track of the guns, or, as it turns out, they may have been called off from continuing to track the guns.
I was watching The Daily Show last night when Jon Stewart started taking about this undercover government operation called “Fast and Furious,” the operation that allowed hundreds of illegal semi-automatic gun purchases to take place in Arizona so that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) could track the guns and bring down the Mexican drug cartel. The operation began in October 2009 when it appeared that an increasing number of U.S. purchased guns were being used by the Mexican drug cartels, but when two of the firearms showed up at the crime scene in which a U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed in a shoot-out in December 2010, people started questioning the whole thing.