At American Thinker, Russ Vaughn has an excellent piece of Gunwalker Conspiracy analysis.

Project Gunrunner Wasn't Fast and Furious by Any Means.

A commenter on one of my Comments raised a possibility I had not previously considered. As soon as Obama was elected, gun owners across America, fearing just this kind of undermining of their constitutional rights by an administration incubated in Chicago, one of the most anti-gun metropolitan areas in America, began a furious buying of guns and ammunition. Ask anyone in the firearms industry, the Obama presidency has been the best sales stimulator they have ever experienced. Fearing that some form of federal ban or punitive excise tax might be forthcoming from this Chicago mob, I, like many millions of others, enhanced my personal arsenal and bought up large quantities of ammunition.

And that phenomenon raises the question postulated by the commenter: Was Fast & Furious a knee-jerk liberal reaction by an anti-gun administration that feared a quickly re-arming America? Plant guns in Mexico that could be eTraced back to the U.S. and then use that evidence to anger the American public into going along with stricter, federal gun control legislation? The obviously too-orchestrated claims by too many federal officials that ninety percent of the weapons confiscated following violent crimes in Mexico were simply too pat and too obvious to those of us who know something about the procurement of weapons. It simply made no sense whatsoever for the rich and powerful cartels to engage in nickel and dime purchases of semi-automatic* weapons in dribs and drabs across one of the most heavily-defended borders in the world when they could buy fully-automatic** weapons by the shipload from multiple sources around the world and at far lower prices. For that reason, folks in the know all around the world hoo-hawed at the Obama administration's blatantly phony attempts to link gun violence in Mexico to American-purchased arms. On the other hand, the lefties of the world ate it up.

We are faced with a clear reality: an armed citizenry represents a clear and present danger to those leftists and Marxists who would seek to render them a harmless and complacent herd. These same leftists and Marxists are joined in this belief with despots all across the political spectrum, and all around the world. Regardless of whether you are a left-wing dictator or a right-wing tyrant, you have to be keenly aware that an unarmed populace isn't likely to storm the palace and inflict fatal wounds upon those who have subjugated them.

I recall vividly talking to a former FBI analyst in the late Nineties on this very subject. He told me that the Constitutional militia movement didn't scare the analysts in the Hoover Building so much as did the movement coupled with the unintended consequences of firearm sales generated by the Brady Law and the AWB -- millions of semi-automatic rifles of military utility (more of that class of weaponry than had been previously sold in the previous two decades) and billions of rounds of ammunition were sold and stashed by American citizens -- even in the face of more expected restrictions, even confiscations. The analysts quickly realized, and passed on their conclusions to the Clintonista policy makers they served, that these weapons were not being purchased in order to be turned in with the next law but rather with a view to turning them ON the people who would pass that law and in resistance to it. This was a sobering and scary thought. Clinton's acts closing down the sources of Chinese SKS and AK rifles and 7.62x39 ammo, said the analyst to me, were not motivated by human rights considerations as claimed, but by the fear of such weapons and ammo in hands of American militiamen and women. As I recall, he was derisive at the flimsy excuse. "He wasn't worried about the lives of Chinese dissidents, he was worried about his own lily-white ass over gun control."

Yet the former Clintonistas who largely made up the Obama administration also recalled vividly the political costs of naked gun control -- the 1994 election debacle. Whatever they would do to advance their agenda had to be done, in the words of Obama to Sarah Brady, "under the radar."

Enter, stage left, the Gunwalkers.