I got an email tip saying "Look What Our Border Patrol Found Two Weeks Ago in Arizona - Frightening." It was included with several other photos besides the one here, as well as a link to a blog posting it.
That blog does not link to a source, but merely reproduces an obvious chain email (replete with red, black and blue lettering of various fonts and sizes with strategic underlining for emphasis), so there's no way to determine when or where these photos were taken, and whether or not the accompanying text is relevant and accurate--but the near-hysterical layout/presentation should give us a clue.
A 2010 Reuters photo credit I found during a quick keyword search places this incident at Higueras near Monterrey, 100 miles or so from the Texas border and nowhere near Arizona. And further looking around yielded
this related video.
That doesn't mean finding caches of weapons in Mexico is not an issue. It is, and the capture of military ordnance, including grenade launchers and the like, demonstrates that paramilitary cartel operations aren't getting such things from U.S. gun stores.
But what it does mean is that someone took something with a core of truth, and then went in and made changes to some basic facts for a reason of their own in the hopes that others would pick up their altered version and run with it.
I suspect people get this stuff circulating in emails so activists and bloggers will pick up on it and give it further weight--which makes the ones who fall for it easy targets for discrediting--get one to swallow and promote a chain email and everything else they write about can be ridiculed.
What we know for sure is
someone at the beginning of this thread changed things with intent to spread disinformation.The question is, who are they?
In the mean time,
please heed this. Otherwise,
stuff like this happens.
A good rule of thumb: If it doesn't link to a credible source, try to verify it before passing it on.
