Mexican violence, gun controls.(Correction, Please!)

ITEM: On the CBS television show Face the Nation on April 12, in an interview with Bob Schieffer, Mexico's Ambassador to the United States Arturo Sarukhan tried to blame much of the violence in his country on the allegedly lax gun-control laws in the United States. He maintained in part: "Ninety percent of all weapons we are seizing in Mexico, Bob, are coming from across the United States." Reinstituting the so-called assault-weapons ban in the United States, which expired in 2004, said the ambassador, "could have a profound impact on the number and the caliber of weapons going down to Mexico."

ITEM: On April 20, Time magazine commemorated the 10th anniversary of the murders at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, with an article on its Time.com site decrying that, over the past decade, "massacres perpetrated by deranged gunmen have continued." However, said writer Michael Lindenberger, "something odd has occurred. Whatever momentum the Columbine killings gave to gun control has long since petered out." The Time writer grumbled that "the debate seems to be almost one-sided nowadays, with an ongoing backlash against gun control."

CORRECTION: The Time writer who complained about one-sidedness in the gun-control "debate" was firing blanks: he gave but one side of the issue--for more controls.

As it happens, the worst shooting incidents in the United States have occurred in areas where the deck has been stacked against armed sell-defense. As pointed out by John Lott, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland and the author of More Guns, Less Crime, "All multiple victim public shootings with more than three people killed have occurred where permitted concealed handguns are prohibited."

Meanwhile, the "90 percent" figure--widely alleged to be the percentage of guns recovered at Mexican crime scenes originating in the United States--is being sprayed around like real machine-gun fire. Very inaccurately, as it turns out.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

For example, when President Obama was in Mexico, he said: "More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border." In similar fashion, Senator Dianne Feinstein, (D-Calif.) griped at a Senate hearing: "It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico and used to shoot judges, police officers and mayors ... come from the United States."