This article in the Washington Post (from about a year ago) highlights this nicely. Since I tend towards one narrative I have extracted some quotes that bolster it:
The battle has hobbled Fast and Furious, a case that individuals inside ATF say held the promise of becoming one of the agency’s best investigations ever.
“We have never been up so high in the Sinaloa cartel, the largest and most powerful drug cartel in the world,” said a federal official involved in the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “This is an open, ongoing investigation. It is so unfair.”
Agents along the border had long been frustrated by what one ATF supervisor later called “toothless” laws that made it difficult to attack gun-trafficking networks. Straw buyers — people with no criminal record who purchase guns for criminals or illegal immigrants who can’t legally buy them — are subject to little more than paperwork violations. Even people convicted of buying AK-47s meant for the cartels typically just get probation for lying on a federal form attesting that they were buying the guns for themselves. With such a light penalty, it is hard to persuade those caught to turn informant against their bosses. And federal prosecutors rarely want to bring such charges because they do not consider the effort worth their time, according to ATF supervisors. [My emphasis]
The narrative I favour describes an operation that did not facilitate the cartels to buy guns, but rather, recorded a huge number of gun sales during the period it was ongoing. A key point, IMO, is that if F&F had not been in operation those gun sales would have taken place anyway.The reasoning was that an arrest of a straw purchaser would not get ATF the bigger fish; the buyer would get a light punishment, if any, and the cartel could just find another buyer.
This is absolutely crucial to how I view this scandal, because it outlines the political elements starkly. If guns were not deliberately 'walked' then Rep. Issa can be viewed as a political opportunist of the kind willing to jeopardise an ongoing investigation to score political points. On the other hand, if it can be shown that gun were allowed to 'walk' because prosecuters wanted to avoid an awkward 2nd Amendment debate during an election year, then all of Pres. Obama appointments can be viewed as clinically politically motivated.
I think that this is the first time that I have seen two such narratives emerge so clearly from what might loosely be called a single set of facts.
u.