Rep. Darrell Issa, Republican chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, spoke at the NRA’s mid-April national convention in St. Louis and appeared on NRA News’ Cam & Company to discuss Fast and Furious. News coverage of the convention focused on the extreme rhetoric of NRA board member Ted Nugent, but Issa made some rather explosive comments of his own.
Fast and Furious was launched under the Bush administration, and continued by the Obama administration, to investigate and undermine the smuggling of guns from the US to Mexico by drug cartels. However, the government lost track of many of the guns sold through the program, and some were connected to the murders of Mexican citizens and a US federal agent. Issa thinks he knows why.
Issa, speaking to the NRA faithful, advanced the baseless and reckless conspiracy theory that the Obama administration intentionally lost track of guns sold through the program in order to boost gun violence and clear the way for an assault weapons ban. Issa posed this as a rhetorical question and then answered it:
They’ve never answered the question, “What were they thinking of?” Could it be that what they really were thinking of was in fact to use this walking of guns in order to promote an assault weapons ban. Many think so. And they haven’t come up with an explanation that would cause any of us not to agree.
Later in the interview, Issa suggested that the Obama administration let people die in order to promote gun control and then described Fast and Furious explicitly as part of a larger assault on the Second Amendment:
We have to expect law enforcement to hold us accountable under fair laws but also hold the bad guys accountable rather than allowing bad things to happen and justifying new laws against law-abiding citizens. […]This administration has trampled on the Constitution, on the First Amendment, on religious rights, and if you don’t think that this Fast and Furious and things like it are the beginning of an attack in the second term on the Second Amendment, you really haven’t evaluated this president.
No less than Rush Limbaugh has been advancing Issa’s conspiracy theory. On yesterday’s program, Limbaugh set out the conspiracy theory in great detail:
The whole point, don’t forget, the whole point of Fast and Furious was to create mayhem in Mexico among drug cartels with American-made weapons easily procured so that you and I would stand up in outrage and demand tighter gun laws. It was deceitful. It was sneaky. It was going against the will of the American people. It was liberalism on parade. It’s who these people are. They want tighter gun laws. Folks, I want to make this as simple as I can. They created crimes. There’s no other way to characterize this. They created, they manufactured crime. They enabled crimes. They saw to it that American guns ended up in Mexican drug cartel hands. And, of course, those people get the guns, they use them. When, in fact, it probably was difficult for the drug cartels to get the guns. It probably was not easy for the drug cartels to get the guns. Certainly not walking into gun stores in Phoenix and elsewhere, then crossing the border.So they set that up. They created crimes. It would be no different than if they wanted to ban airplanes, to engineer a bunch of crashes. I’m trying to think of a smart analogy to give you. If this bunch wanted all airplanes grounded, sabotage a bunch so they crash, and the people of the country demand that all airplanes be grounded. They wanted these guns that were used in these crimes to come from America. […]Well, you put the weapons you want to ban in the hands of the bad guys and turn ’em loose. It’s all this is. And now the documents that document this or prove it, Darrell Issa’s committee wants them, and Obama has asserted executive privilege to prevent the Congress from seeing them. It’s really no more complicated than that. Obama wants an assault weapons ban, he can’t politically get it because it’s not popular, so he tries to effect it anyway.
So there you have it. President Obama, if Issa and Limbaugh are to be believed, is so fanatical about gun control that he boosted gun violence and deaths in order to create a public demand for it.
