When Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed by Mexican drug cartel members using weapons that, under the ATF’s “Fast and Furious” program, were allowed to be smuggled into Mexico, it didn’t just anger American law enforcement. It also threw a monkey wrench into a carefully planned operation whose real purpose was to enable President Obama to justify major new restrictions on American citizens who want to buy and own guns, and especially “military style” weapons.

For those unfamiliar with the program, “Fast and Furious” (dubbed “Gun Walker” because it allowed guns to “walk into Mexico” unchallenged) had ATF agents essentially work with cooperating gun stores, recording the serial numbers of guns that were sold to “straw purchasers” who then illegally transferred them to Mexican gang members. The most controversial aspect of the program was that ATF agents were directed NOT to arrest the illegal buyers, but merely track where the guns went.

In their defense, many of the field agents vehemently protested to their commanding officers, who told them in no uncertain terms that they were to “stand down” and let the buyers go on their way. In one case, they described how a 22-year old woman driving a beat up old car was allowed to walk out the door after having paid $10,000 cash for a dozen or more military style rifles. Where they went is anyone’s guess.

The alleged purpose of this insane program was to allow American and Mexican law enforcement officials to track where the guns came from and where they went, in order to facilitate identifying and prosecuting members of the drug cartels. But since the likely recipients of these weapons would already be guilty of a whole laundry list of offenses under Mexican law, from drug dealing to murder, such a claim is simply a canard. The real reason behind “Fast and Furious” can be found in the Democrats’ almost obsessive hatred of guns.

For decades, the far left wing of the Democratic Party, which includes Obama and most of his Administration, has never given up on their war against American private gun ownership. They genuinely despise the 2nd Amendment, and are always trying to come up with new and devious ways to make owning a gun in America ever more complicated, expensive, and difficult. But they keep their anti-gun scheming behind closed doors – they have learned the hard way that gun control is a loser at the ballot box.

Because when it comes to guns, Americans don’t trust Democrats. Note that when Democrats took over the Congress in 2007, gun sales soared. And since Obama’s inauguration, Americans have scrambled to buy guns in record numbers – sales jumped more than 40% in the first year of his presidency alone, and have continued at rates well above historical averages, although things quieted down somewhat after the Democrats were thrashed in the 2010 election. The Obama Administration knew that they had to find a new way to justify restrictions on American gun owners, preferably without having to deal with the legislature.

Enter the “Fast and Furious” program, a plan that would let a bunch of weapons cross the border into Mexico, knowing full well that eventually, some of those guns would be bound to turn up in criminal hands there, perhaps being used in violent confrontations between gangs, or even in shoot-outs with Mexican law enforcement. With the levels of drug and gang violence in Mexico, it was a good bet.

Then, after a number of the tracked guns were used in criminal acts, the plan was that Mexico would make a very loud and vigorous “protest” to the U.S. government, demanding that “something be done” about all those American guns that are “flooding into Mexico” – giving Obama a talking point in order to ratchet up U.S. gun control, while providing Mexican officials with a convenient scapegoat for their own inability to stop the carnage. Both the American and the Mexican administrations win.

Which brings us to the essence of the strategy behind “Fast and Furious.” Once the “gun problem” involved relations between two sovereign nations, it would then no longer be merely a domestic matter, it would be an international “crisis” -  a matter of foreign policy. And in case you forgot your high school civics, foreign policy is the sole province of the Executive Branch, in other words, the President.

Which means Barak Obama would have had a whole range of options previously unavailable in his war on guns.

The president could push through an international agreement with Mexico, which would naturally involve “measures to control the flow of illegal guns” – like closing down gun shows, for example. He could also sign on to an even broader “small arms” treaty like the one the U.N. has had simmering on the back burner for several years. Or, he could simply issue a series of  Executive Orders – one can only imagine what sort of “emergency measures” that Obama and his equally anti-gun Attorney General Eric Holder might produce.

But then Agent Terry was killed, placing both the ATF and the Obama Administration in an embarrassing predicament, exposing the fact that the United States government was “holding the door open” for gun runners, who had now killed an American, enraging civilians and law enforcement alike. That was not in the plan.

Things got even worse when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata was shot while sitting in his car in Mexico. As it turned out, guns from the “Fast and Furious” program were not used in Zapata’s shooting. But it didn’t matter, because the program had already attracted the kind of intense scrutiny that neither Obama nor Holder wanted.

Naturally, the Administration, including Obama himself, has denied any knowledge of the “Fast and Furious” program, and Attorney General Eric Holder has basically been mum. And no doubt there will be hearings and investigations, after which one or more in the upper levels of the ATF will dutifully “fall on their swords” – and the Obama-friendly media will echo the feigned outrage of the administration.

But one would have to be terminally naive, or simply clueless, to actually believe that an operation of this magnitude, especially one that involved allowing guns to illegally flow into a foreign country, could have been created, let alone implemented, without the direct involvement and approval of both the Attorney General’s office and the White House. That Obama and Holder weren’t even aware of it is simply inconceivable.

Thus we are left with only one inescapable conclusion, and that is that the President of the United States and his Attorney General Eric Holder were complicit in an attempt to fabricate an international crisis in order to advance their anti-gun agenda, and in doing so, have facilitated the deaths of an untold number of innocent victims. Which also means that, in a very real sense, Agent Brian Terry’s blood is on their hands.

John Caile