WaPo's article on Mexicartel guns: noisy report, but inaccurate--Part I

A recent Washington Post article on how the Mexican Cartels get their guns is flawed by typical MSM sensationalism and inaccuracy when it comes to guns. There are in fact too many errors in Manuel Roig-Franzia's article for a single blog post to list them all, but I'll hit some highlights here. Here's an excerpt cropped from their graphic about the number of seizures:

Of course these "assault weapons" (itself a meaningless legalistic term created by a since-expired 1994 law designed to ban cosmetically ugly weapons) are described as "high-powered". Relative to what? The AK-47s they describe as causing so much havoc are about as powerful as an .30-30 deer rifle, measured in muzzle energy and nowhere near the muzzle energy of a .30-06 or even a .308. The 5.56mm AR-15s are, again, nowhere near as powerful as a .30-30.* More magazine capacity? Faster rate of fire? Definitely. But they're not "high powered" in any meaningful sense of that word.

It gets worse.

Mexico is a rich market for smugglers because it bans high-caliber automatic weapons -- even police are prohibited from using them -- and has strict gun laws that make it extremely difficult for members of the public to buy handguns.

First, there's your problem right there. Whatever these magical "high caliber" automatic weapons are that the police can't have, why shouldn't Mexico equip its police with weapons suited for the job?**

Oh, wait, that's what the Mexican police do, too. Later in the same piece, the reporter describes the armament of the Tijuana police as...AR 15s:

Outside the office of Zatara¿n Cedano, the Tijuana police director, a man always stands guard with an AR-15 rifle. Inside, Zatara¿n Cedano wears a handgun strapped over his shoulder and is surrounded by armed men.

...

Zatara¿n Cedano, who equips most of his employees with handguns, has just 150 AR-15 rifles to spread among 3,000 officers. Arms smugglers bring more than that into Mexico in a typical two-hour period.

So are these AR-15s examples of the "high caliber" weapons Mexican law prohibits their police from carrying? Not by any reasonable interpretation of "high caliber". Caliber is, more or less, the diameter of the bullet. And the AR15 uses a bullet of tiny diameter--smaller (though more powerful) than a .22 rimfire.***

What it sounds like Mr. Roig-Franzia is saying is that the Mexican police are barred from using the (7.62 x 39 mm) AK-47s he describes in the opening of his article. So far these are simply errors typical of mainstream media reports about gun issues. But the proliferation of AK-47s is a significantly different problem, one with some important political implications. After all, this article is trying to make a point about American guns equipping the Mexican cartels, and the way he argues that point is quite misleading. More about that in a follow-up entry I'll post tomorrow or later tonight.

*You can compare muzzle energy here; for the 5.56mm NATO round used in the AR-15 and M16, read the line where it says .223 (its civilian designation). For the Russian 7.62 x 39 round used in the SKS and AK variants, see the line marked "Standard M1943 USSR".

** If in fact they are better suited; American police who aren't on SWAT teams usually are only armed with semi-automatic .223 rifles or shotguns in their cars--and this is America where all these nasty weapons are supposedly coming from!

*** A .22 rimfire shoots a bullet that is .224" in diameter. The AR15 and M16 fire the 5.56mm NATO round, which is sold commercially as a .223 Remington--a thousandth of an inch smaller than than the .22.