Remember Operation Fast and Furious - this was the absolutely brilliant plan from Attorney General Eric Holder to relax the requirements for gun buying in the Southwest (near Phoenix) with the intent that Mexican Cartel members would buy these guns and we could analyze their movements when these guns were recovered at crime scenes.
Tow of these guns were recovered at the murder scene of United States Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. More here, here and here.
Well, another gun has turned up and not in the hands of a cartel member - from the Los Angeles Times:
Assailant in Garland, Texas, attack bought gun in 2010 under Fast and Furious operation
Five years before he was shot to death in the failed terrorist attack in Garland, Texas, Nadir Soofi walked into a suburban Phoenix gun shop to buy a 9-millimeter pistol..
At the time, Lone Wolf Trading Co. was known among gun smugglers for selling illegal firearms. And with Soofi's history of misdemeanor drug and assault charges, there was a chance his purchase might raise red flags in the federal screening process.
Inside the store, he fudged some facts on the form required of would-be gun buyers.
What Soofi could not have known was that Lone Wolf was at the center of a federal sting operation known as Fast and Furious, targeting Mexican drug lords and traffickers. The idea of the secret program was to allow Lone Wolf to sell illegal weapons to criminals and straw purchasers, and track the guns back to large smuggling networks and drug cartels.
Instead, federal agents lost track of the weapons and the operation became a fiasco, particularly after several of the missing guns were linked to shootings in Mexico and the 2010 killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in Arizona.
Soofi's attempt to buy a gun caught the attention of authorities, who slapped a seven-day hold on the transaction, according to his Feb. 24, 2010, firearms transaction record, which was reviewed by the Los Angeles Times. Then, for reasons that remain unclear, the hold was lifted after 24 hours, and Soofi got the 9-millimeter.
As the owner of a small pizzeria, the Dallas-born Soofi, son of a Pakistani American engineer and American nurse, would not have been the primary focus of federal authorities, who back then were looking for smugglers and drug lords.
He is now.
In May, Soofi and his roommate, Elton Simpson, burst upon the site of a Garland cartoon convention that was offering a prize for the best depiction of the prophet Muhammad, something offensive to many Muslims. Dressed in body armor and armed with three pistols, three rifles and 1,500 rounds of ammunition, the pair wounded a security officer before they were killed by local police.
More at the site - there is no word just how many more of these guns are out there.
Holder is just not that intelligent - his appointment was a 100% political payback and not because he was the best person for the job. The idea that Fast and Furious would be beneficial to the interests of the United States is ludicrous. Holder was held in criminal contempt (255 to 67) by the US House of Representatives. This is the first time in American history that the head of the Justice Department has been held in contempt by Congress.