It is quite apparent that Obama is disarming border patrol agents in advance of his forthcoming executive order that will provide amnesty to illegal immigrants. Approximately half of the United States Customs and Border Patrol’s M4 carbine weapons have been taken away by the federal government, supposedly because the weapons posed safety concerns for border agents. Some people do not buy this explanation, such as Representative Steve King (R-Iowa.)
Congressman King said with a laugh: “There’s no more reliable weapon in the world,” and that “Any agency like the Department of Homeland Security that has bought millions of rounds of ammunition over the past few years could certainly afford to replace with new serviceable M4s all the weapons they are [taking] for testing. This sounds to me like a ruse to start to take the weapons out of the hands of the Border Patrol.” King stated that “the M4, M16 and AR15 have interchangeable parts and feature identical action,” and “If there were any problem with them as far as safety was concerned, it would be all over the Internet.”
King emphasized that the Department of Homeland Security must beheld accountable for what he referred to as an entirely specious argument. He said: “I don’t get it. How does DHS go from ‘Fast and Furious’ to disarming the Border Patrol?” King was obviously referring to the Justice Department’s gun scandal, during which thousands of weapons were sent to Mexico and ultimately ended up in criminals’ hands.
“If you disarm the Border Patrol in preparation for issuing an executive edict of unconstitutional amnesty, that starts a flood of illegal immigrants into the United States, and we can’t protect our borders,” King stated.
Art del Cueto, the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector union president said that in over a decade of time spent on Border Patrol duties, he has never seen so many weapons removed by the federal government at one time due to “safety” issues. He also stated that the federal agents arrived to inspect and confiscate the weapons with no advance notice, but rather simply showed up and told agents that a certain number of weapons had “issues” and must be removed.
“We have trained armorers working as agents and if there were problems with any of the weapons, they could have been fixed without federal agents removing them,” he said. “We are hearing that some of the problems were firing pins. We could have removed firing pins without requiring federal agents to remove the weapon and send it off somewhere for repairs.”
As a result of this weapon confiscation by the federal government, border agents in the area do not have personally sighted weapons anymore. Rather, all border patrol agents are currently using M4s that were used previously by someone else. Congressman King expressed a determination to find out exactly what the Department of Homeland Security is up to at the border.
