Facts are always convincing, it’s the conclusions drawn from facts that are frequently in error.

Fact: the Drug cartels south of our border are better armed than the Mexican police or military.  
 
Fact:  many of these weapons are manufactured in and sold to the cartels in the United States.

It’s like the argument that Monsanto made in relation to Agent Orange.  We make Agent Orange, but we do not use it on the battlefield.  Americans make the weapons and ammunition, but they are not using them to kill people to control the illegal importation of drugs into our country.

Fact: something ought to be done to stop the flow of weapons from the US to Mexico.  And, this is where reason and logic should reign but rarely does. 

The most important question in law enforcement is always, how we are going to accomplish the task.

Well, in this case the means seemed obvious to federal law enforcement, presidentially appointed, officials.  You allow the purchase of weapons by the cartels in the United States and track them as the guns make their way through the inner workings of the Mexican drug cartel’s organisational structure.

What this obvious plan ignores is reason and logic.  There is a supply side to the gun problem, and a demand side. 
There are things that you can do to control supply, and other interventions to address demand.

One of the things you do not do to control the supply of guns is to increase the supply of guns, or make it easier to buy and ship guns into another country on the hope that you will be able to track them.  This ignores the fact that the guns are now in the hands of a violent drug gang in the middle of a war, not only with other drug gangs, but with the Mexican police and increasingly their military, and with that great power north of their border.

The setting is all too familiar.  Mr. President, you just sign on the bottom line and we will get rid of Castro.  Mr. President, you just sign on the bottom line and we will get a handle on illegal guns going to the drug cartels.  
Mr. President, you just sign on the bottom line and …

Naturally, these same officials lost the ability, if they ever had it, to track the weapons once they entered Mexico.  Hundreds of deaths have been traced to the use of the guns our officials helped get into the drug cartel pipeline, including the murder of at least one American Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry.

As to the House of Representative’s Oversight Committee, there must be a definition of the word oversight with which this author is unfamiliar.