the whole story

Remember that myth that 90% of the firearms being used by criminals in Mexico came from the United States?
Oddly enough, it continues to be nothing more than a myth:

One important figure differs from what we had in our story, though it doesn’t change our conclusion about Obama’s statement. According to the GAO report, a total of 29,824 firearms were seized in Mexico in 2008. That number comes from CENAPI, the Spanish acronym for Mexico’s Planning, Analysis and Information Center for Combating Crime, GAO said. We had great difficulty pinning down the number of guns recovered, and eventually relied on an account citing Mexico’s attorney general, who reportedly said that nearly 30,000 guns had been recovered over the years 2007 and 2008 — a two-year period. The new data mean that Mexican officials are submitting an even smaller percentage of the firearms they seize for tracing by ATF than we had previously believed.

But if the total number of guns seized in Mexico last year is greater than the figure we found, the bottom line remains the same: The 90 percent figure applies to the number of guns seized and submitted to the U.S. for tracing. It may also apply to all the guns seized, but there is no data to support that.

(Emphasis added.)
After all, why would the Mexican government turn over firearms to the American government if those firearms are not actually in the American government’s database? It would make absolutely no sense to hand over all of the firearms the Mexicans recover that do not have serial numbers on them – you know, the ones that are being smuggled in from countries other than America – simply because the ATF would not be able to do a darned thing with them. And thus the dataset from which the 90% myth has been derived is already suspect, and the myth is already unprovable before it even starts out of the gate.
Now, if we had some hard-and-fast numbers as to how many firearms the Mexican government has recovered from crimals in the past few years, if the Mexican government actually turned over all firearms that could possibly be traced through the American system, and if the ATF was able to execute successful history searches on all of those firearms, then we might have sufficient data from which to draw a conclusion, and generate some believable percentages. But we do not have the first, we have no way of guaranteeing the second, and the third is the sole basis for the entire 90% myth.
If there is one thing to be said for the way hoplophobes abuse statistics, it is that their abuse is typically obvious, clumsy, and blatant, and thus quite easy to call out. The “90% Myth” is no different.
(Courtesy of Say Uncle.)