I heard about this story on NPR and had some ambivalence about whether to post about it.   Essentially, the ATF is being accused of permitting 1300+ guns to be purchsed by straw buyers and shipped to drug gangs in Mexico.     Straw buyers are middlemen who can buy guns in the U.S. without raising a bunch of red flags and then resell them to people who can’t.

But, Fox News is reporting that some of the straw buyers were actually ATF agents, making he U.S. government an actual participant rather than just an observer.