Obama: Border Agents to Fight Gangs With Limited Edition Beanie-Babies

This camo blazer makes me hard to see.

Woops, there goes my mom to apply for a job as a border patrol agent (she hearts beanie-babies…especially the limited edition ones).  But seriously folks, things are getting a bit dicey south the border (or almost south of the border).  Apparently a gun battle broke out near Nogales, Arizona, the evening of December 14, 2010.  Sort of.  While the bad guys were armed with guns and real bullets, our border patrol agents were packing Red Rider BB guns:

Border Patrol agents shot beanbags at a group of suspected bandits before the men returned fire during a confrontation in a remote canyon, killing agent Brian Terry with a single gunshot, records show.

[…]

The documents say the group of illegal border entrants refused commands to drop their weapons after agents confronted them at about 11:15 p.m. Two agents fired beanbags at the migrants, who responded with gunfire. Two agents returned fire, one with a long gun and one with a pistol, but Terry was mortally wounded in the gunfight.

Not surprisingly, Brian Terry’s brother Kent found our border patrol policies a bit out of whack,

‘You go up against a bandit crew that is carrying AKs, and you walk out there with guns loaded with beanbags – I don’t get it,’ Terry said in a phone interview from Michigan. ‘It’s like going to the Iraqi war with one knife. It boggles my mind. …

That would be pretty dumb, huh?  Going into the Iraq war with a knife.  Of course, while our soldiers did have guns, Barry’s military policy in Afghanistan wasn’t much more effective than having a knife: don’t shoot the bad guys until they shoot at you first.  Anyone noticing a pattern here?

And what were the agents like Brian Terry doing at the time of the shootout? 

On the night of the shooting, Terry and his crew were targeting a ‘rip crew’ that robbed and assaulted drug runners and illegal immigrants, said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

That’s right.  Terry was killed while targeting a group of criminals that robbed and assaulted other criminals.  Shouldn’t we be in favor of such activity?  Does anyone else find this to be a waste of resources? 

Oh yeah, then there are those allegations about where the bad guys got their guns in the first place:

The Terry family remains upset about allegations that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed a gun smuggler it was investigating to purchase and smuggle into Mexico the weapons used in the shootout in which Terry died.

Yes, they’re just allegations, but allegations that have not been denied by the feds.  To borrow a line from Charlie Sheen, our Mexican border policy was written by droopy-eyed armless children.  Definitely not winning.

But wait, there’s more!  Even though we have border agents in Mexico to assist Mexican police in dealing with heavily-armed drug cartels, our people don’t carry guns; despite the fact the one of our immigration agents, Jaime Zapata, was killed last month while in Mexico.  Barry’s response, after meeting with Mexican president Felipe Calderon:

‘There are laws in place in Mexico that say that our agents should not be armed,’ Obama said, describing the U.S. role south of the border as an ‘advisory’ one. ‘We do not carry out law enforcement activities inside of Mexico.’

But yet we’re in Mexico providing advice to Mexican law enforcement.  Why?  Is Tijuana nice this time of year?  Well, at least Felipe is looking into it,

Calderon said Mexican officials are ‘deeply analyzing alternatives.’

Huh?  The only other alternative is not getting shot at by drug cartels.  And that plan isn’t working very well either.  Hey, maybe the translation was bad.  Maybe Calderon actually said “Mexican officials are heavily consuming tequila.”  That would make a little more sense, right?  Of course it would.