What’s going on here?

I don’t know if was the reporter or the ATF agent. But it was probably one of them that has a decimal point out of place or has much more valuable AKs that I have ever heard of:

Agents said Thursday they found the 42 weapons in a storage locker about 10 days ago. There guns were worth $250,000 in all: Belgian-made “FN” handguns, semiautomatic AK rifles and other pistols. They also found four olive boxes loaded with 50-caliber bullets—ammunition that’s big enough to take out an airplane.

“These are, quite frankly, weapons of war,” ATF special agent Tom Mangan said as he picked up an assault rifle and examined it.

“The type of fire power you’re seeing here is on the increase,” he said. “You’re seeing sophisticated weapons, military weapons, assault type weapons, assault pistols, very expensive pistols.”

ATF officials said gun runners typically gather large caches of weapons anonymously through “straw” purchases. They might give someone $100 to go into a gun show or a Wal-Mart and buy a few rifles at a time. They might buy guns over the Internet.

Any idea what an “olive box” is? Ignoring that–the 42 weapons figures out to nearly $6,000 per firearm. Could it be someone was that sloppy with the numbers? Or was it something else? If it were just the numbers I would give someone a pass for making a careless mistake. But the ATF agent is exaggerating with the other stuff too. It makes me suspicious. Mr. Mangan sure gets his name in the news frequently.

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6 thoughts on “What’s going on here?

  1. “Olive box” has to be one of those ubiquitous olive-drab ammo cans. I must have 2 dozen of them, and that probably makes me a beginner. My bet is the ATF bozo is a grand-standing idiot or has an anti-gun axe to grind, and the reporter is typically ignorant and just slurped it up.

  2. Interesting how the “weapons of war” at a gun show can all be picked up for about $100 (Priced any AR-15s lately? $100 might buy you a bolt carrier.) However, when the BatBoys want to grandstand about their latest score, they inflate the value of the guns exponentially. It isn’t a mistake at all. It’s their perception of how the public will see the data. Cheap guns = bad. Great big ATF bust = good.

    Mangan probably has one or two media shills that he can call up on a moment’s notice to grandstand on some issue. These guys are in collusion to manipulate public opinion in every way possible. I doubt if the policy comes down from on high, but I have no doubt it happens locally.

  3. On the box, that is what I suspected too, but that’s not what they said. I was trying to give the bozos a possible out rather than flat out stating they had been smoking crack or just don’t care about the facts. I have some olive barrels I store ammonium nitrate in and I thought it was possible there were olive boxes that might be useful for ammo storage.

    DeFens, it’s possible they were trying to say they paid a straw-man $100 for his time to buy the gun. The real buyer paid the $100 plus the price of the gun. It’s misleading, but gives them plausible deniability if they were ever confronted with their error.

    I also found it interesting one could by guns over the Internet too. [sarcasm]I didn’t realize GCA68 had an Internet loophole.[/sarcasm]

  4. The dollar figure is either just the typical grandstanding, or a decimal point error. Hard to tell.

    But the rest of it is all consistent with the “sporting purposes” BS that the ATF (and Congress for that matter) want to restrict us to. But it makes you wonder if Mangan has priced Perazzi shotguns recently. The ‘high-dollar’ = evil is a new one.

  5. The cliché is so thick I get stuck in it several times per sentence, but there is one to add to your book of phrases– you have yourself not only an “arsenal” in your “compound” and another in your “bunker” but now you have a “weapons cache”. “Enough to equip several car loads of drug runners.”

    My wife has enough knives in the kitchen “to equip a whole cult of sadistic serial murderers” too. OMG!!

    And taking down an airplane? Ever see what it took for a W.W. II fighter plane to bring down a flimsy aluminum and magnesium plane, using six 50 caliber machineguns at once? It wasn’t always easy. Some of the planes absorbed dozens of rounds and kept flying.

    Anyway, as I always say; what’s one order of magnitude between friends?

    No details on where the guns were found, or for that matter, whether they were legally possessed.

    It reads like a made-to-order story written by some international anti-gunner group. All America’s fault, yakkity yak yak. Yeah, those Mexicans finally got it all figured out and only the U.S. stands in the way of their utopia-in-the-making.

    I want to know why drug dealers south of the border would bother to pay high U.S. prices for their guns when they could buy container loads of them from Eastern Europe, China, Brazil…. But that wouldn’t be news, would it? Not when the subject at hand is our eeeevil American freedoms that are causing so much death and destruction worldwide, right?

    I guess Mexico has no better border security than the U.S.. That’s what I take from the story. The rest is fluff.

  6. I was wondering about the $100 dollar guns myself, like to have a couple for barter. Bought myself a olive box the other day, no olives though.

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