Meh. Other than a few oddities like .50BMG caliber Barretts, there are better sources for “high power” arms for narcotrafficantes. As some wag put it: is a drug kingpin, sitting in his million-dollar up-armored Hummvee, having just inspected a DC-10 packed with tons of pure coke, going to tell his minions “go across the border to Bubba’s Bait & Boomsticks and get me a Tec9, I understand he’s lax on his paperwork”? NO! OF COURSE NOT!
And that’s why it’s only sensible to conclude this operation was intended to create a strawman by which the 2nd Amendment could be torn down: there was no other viable purpose, legal or not, for such an operation. Big-budget cartels will get pallets of military-grade arms “lost” during otherwise above-board well-documented inter-government shipments*. Smaller fish will still prefer easily-obtained full-auto arms over the lame semi-auto-only options which “walked”. “Operation Gunrunner” was designed to stop the arms before they crossed the border; this administration’s “Fast and Furious” modification to that operation let them cross and disappear, with ZERO articulable reasoning. Just doesn’t add up to anything other than building an excuse to subject the USA to UN anti-small-arms trafficking regulations by an administration which does not accept American superiority as axiomatic.
* - this was my original theory.
The only thing you got right is the drug kingpin doesn't do the work ~