It got weird, didn't it?

Mexico has been at war with its various drug cartels for some time.  Perhaps as a consequence of that fight, or perhaps simply in parallel, Mexico has been making it harder and harder to obtain guns there.  Not surprisingly guns have been walking south from the U.S. to Mexico.  Clearly Mexican demand, not entirely legally has been fulfilled by American supply.  That's the free market, albeit grey in this case.  The sellers are legally selling guns to buyers who are misrepresenting themselves as being able to legally purchase them.  None of this should surprise anyone.  You don't need to believe in the laws of supply and demand to see them in effect.  Regardless of government style in effect, supply and demand  are real, tangible things.  You need food, you buy it from where it is being sold.  That's irrespective of where you have to go to get it, and of what the commodity is - it works for guns as well as food.

That the guns are being used by a criminal element - buying the guns illegally and using them to violent, illegal effect - is also to be expected.  There is a drug war between rival drug gangs and also the Mexican authorities who are in the dubious position of being almost no more than just another faction.  It makes sense that they would ban guns in Mexico - it gives them a competitive advantage in the violence that plagues that nation.   The government doesn't have a brake on it's authority so it's natural that it would just go ahead and do that.  The drug cartels response - go get guns where they are readily available.  So far, no surprise.  But wait, it gets weird.

Where the story turns a little odd is the U.S. government response.  In an apparent effort to track down gun purchasers (the cartels), the government decided to become a spectator.

As CBS noted in late July,

In other words, Congressional investigators say the very agency charged with preventing weapons from falling into the hands of violent cartels south of the border ... instead facilitated it.

Those weapons have been used to kill scores of people, including Americans as it turns out.  That this is not a scandal on the scale of Watergate would be surprising if you forgot to discount the sympathetic-to-Obama press.  There's no Woodward and Bernstein on Obama scandals and don't expect it.   

sun gun.

But it gets weirder. With all of the 'idiocy' associated with Gunwalker, it might not turn out to be the biggest scandal of the Obama administration.  The $500 million administration job creation loan to the green energy company Solyndra last year that subsequently expanded and then went bankrupt could be.  The administration it turns out was so eager to make a public display of it's green program that it may have overlooked a little something called due diligence.

What's the connection between the two scandals?  Lack of foresight?  Lack of thoughts about consequences?  Media downplay? Sure, all of those.  But the worst connection is probably the transient nature of the jobs created by both initiatives - drug thugs and green jobs.  Neither one is going to be there in the long run.  Maybe those people slain because of government idiocy would still be alive if the guns sold were solar powered.