Sunday, 26 June 2011 17:07 Congressman Randy Forbes
In the heat of the Arizona sun, armed with commands from senior government officials, special agents set out to instruct gun store owners to sell thousands of semi-automatic weapons to illegal straw purchasers. The weapons, once in the hands of criminals, would be run across the border in a scheme by the U.S. government to bring down Mexican arms smuggling networks.
It sounds like a plot out of a summer action flick. The kind of storyline that is made up by Hollywood screen writers and played by a cast of A-list movie stars. It’s not. Instead, it is the very serious reality of a program run through the Bureau of Alchohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that has captured national attention and concern.
Last December, when U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered in a firefight with drug runners in Nogales , Arizona , two of the rifles used in the firefight were traced to, and later shed light on, an operation called “Fast and Furious,” led by the ATF. In the operation, ATF officials told gun-store owners to sell weapons to “strawbuyers,” individuals who legally bought the weapons with the intention of transferring them to criminals destined for Mexico . The ATF monitored the exchanges. But instead of intercepting the weapons when they changed hands, they allowed the guns to “walk” across the border into Mexico in what has become known as “gunrunning.” 
Once the weapons were in Mexico , the idea of Operation Fast and Furious was to trace the weapons back to the strawbuyers and bring down the entire smuggling network. Over 2,000 semiautomatic guns– valued at over one million dollars – were placed into the hands of known criminal organizations.
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