Barack Obama misrepresented gun numbers during his trip to Mexico last week in a way that amounts to lying. Appearing with Mexican President Felipe Calderón on Thursday, Obama spoke about the drug violence in Mexico:

“This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States. More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border.”

Here’s the truth. When the Mexican government confiscates guns, it sorts out those that appear to be made in the United States and sends them to us so we can trace them by serial number. But the guns that they send to us are only a fraction of the total number of guns that they confiscate.

Of the subset of guns sent by the Mexican government to the US, 90% turn out to actually be from the US, and the rest were mistakenly identified. That’s where the 90% figure comes from. But the guns that are actually from the US used in the Mexican gun war are really only about 17% of the total number of guns confiscated by Mexico.

Nevertheless, Obama is using these misleading assertions to promote the Inter-American Arms Treaty, first unsuccessfully proposed in 1998 and now being revived in the new effort to disarm America. The Washington Times notes Obama’s real agenda:

Democrats aren’t alone in repeating phony gun statistics. The New York Times, CNN and numerous networks continue to repeat the 90 percent figure with no reporting to back it up. The hysteria is used to create the notion that a major problem exists with American guns – and Mr. Obama is anxious to step in to solve that problem with a $400 million program to stop U.S. guns from going to Mexico. That initiative would include clampdowns on U.S. gun shops.

It is ridiculous for Mr. Obama to blame Mexico’s lawlessness on Americans as if the longstanding corruption of Mexican elected officials, judges and law-enforcement officers has nothing to do with it. …his real agenda is to pursue gun control here at home.