The guns were cached in swimming pool heating units ― pools and their accessories being the sort of thing you can ship from Miami to Rio de Janeiro without arousing suspicion. The smugglers had gutted the units and filled them back to their original weight with rifles and ammunition.

The shipment was no one-time deal. The Brazilian traffickers had a routine, with code words rooted in Portuguese lingo. The assault-style rifles were flechas in the traffickers’ slang — arrows. The cartridges were biscoitos, or cookies. Bullets and ammunition were jujuba de Smith: jujuba like the candy, Smith as in Smith & Wesson. At one point in their investigation, Rio’s Civil Police listened in on a phone call between two men, one identified as Gil dos Santos Almeida, the other as João Victor Silva Roza, who police say helped negotiate weapon sales in Rio de Janeiro. The following is a translation of a transcript of the call included in Federal Police records and documents from Brazil’s Federal Public Ministry …

Barbieri’s case, however, highlights another phenomenon that is rarely discussed: the fact that American guns often find their way out of the United States via smugglers looking to make an easy profit by selling cheaply bought contraband at a sizable markup.

“This has been going on for decades and decades, because the United States is the candy store of guns for the world,” said Joseph Vince, a retired special agent for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF. “This has nothing to do with the Second Amendment, or hunters or shooters. This has to do with us creating a situation that takes a lot of lives and provides the means for organized crime to exist in these countries.”

Breathless and dramatic, yes?  But there is this admission.

American rifles are not exactly flooding Brazil, at least not to the extent that they have flowed into Mexico and other Latin American countries. Still, in the last three years, Brazil’s Federal Police have seized more than 1,500 American-made guns, most of them from people the police say are drug traffickers and members of drug gangs, according to a report the Federal Police released in December.

1500 American-made guns.  That’s the problem here?  Really, if the alleged gun writers just knew a little more about their subject they wouldn’t look so stupid and say such stupid things.

The folks at Hyatt Gun Shop – one of the largest gun shops on earth generally with 5000+ people on line at any time searching for guns – will tell you that the gunsmiths at Hyatt (there are eight on duty all the time, with many more in the wings) would rather work on a Springfield Armory 1911 than a Kimber any day because it’s a better weapon.

In case you didn’t know, the Springfield Armory 1911s are made in Brazil, where the gunsmiths and fabricators are as good as any in America.  Brazil doesn’t need American weapons because they have their own gunsmiths.  We just pay them more to make good armaments for us instead of Brazilians.

HuffPo: Go back to square one, learn your subject, and start over.  America isn’t Brazil’s problem.  Brazil is Brazil’s problem.