“In 2007 and 2008, some 29,000 weapons of various types and varieties were recovered at crime scenes by Mexican authorities. Of those, only 11,000 of them had serial numbers on them that would allow them even to be traced by the BATFE. And of those 11,000, just 5,114 were successfully traced back to sources in the United States. That’s 17.6 percent, not 70 percent or 90 percent. Just 14 percent of the 203,300 prisoners serving time in a state or federal prison in 1997 obtained their weapons from a gun shop, pawnshop, flea market, or gun show. An updated study by the DOJ in 2004 showed that the number dropped to 11 percent.”
