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Dogs, Children Or Bureaucrats Its A Mistake To Reward Bad Behavior
By Jeff Knox
The Knox Report

FirearmsCoalition.org

Manassas, VA --(Ammoland.com)- Representative Darrel Issa (R-CA) referred to the activities of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) Operation Fast and Furious as “felony stupid.”

Others have suggested that the plan was intentionally designed and cleverly crafted to bolster statistics in support of stricter gun control laws. Whether the operation was just stupid or intentionally criminal, it was clearly bad behavior on the part of ATF and Justice Department (DOJ) and such bad behavior should not be rewarded.

Some members of Congress, Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Elijah Cummings (D-MD) in particular, want to reward ATF and DOJ’s criminal stupidity with increased funding and increased authority through tighter regulation of firearms dealers and lawful firearm purchasers.

ATF has introduced – and the Administration has now approved – and “emergency” regulatory change requiring firearms dealers in border states to report any purchaser who buys more than one semi-auto rifle greater than a .22 within a given week. The US House of Representatives promptly, and properly, rejected the new regulations by passing an appropriations rider prohibiting any funds from being used to enact or enforce the plan.

Proponents of the regulation argue that it gives ATF an important tool to help detect straw buyers and traffickers and that it poses little inconvenience to lawful gun buyers. Many on our side disagree , but usefulness and inconvenience aside, the fact is that Congress has looked at long gun reporting in the past and rejected the idea. For ATF and the Obama administration to now push forward, bypassing Congress, in order to do something Congress has previously refused to do is clearly overreaching and probably illegal. If Congress had passed a law setting auto mileage standards, but had specifically chosen to omit larger pickups from those standards, it would be outrageous for some bureaucracy to later enact regulations including trucks.

This case is no different except that it is questionable whether even Congress has the authority to regulate firearms sales. Unelected bureaucrats certainly don’t.

The regulation also creates a de facto registration system, something Congress has expressly forbidden on numerous occasions, and it puts additional burdens – and liabilities – on the gun dealers. ATF claims that the records will be destroyed after two years, but ATF and DOJ have long histories of reneging on such guarantees, even when they are spelled out in law.

Purchase of multiple firearms within a week is not particularly uncommon and doing so should not make a person a suspect, nor should it result in their personal information being stored in government systems. Also, if the regulation does go into effect, it will be no time at all until ATF will be demanding that the reporting requirement be expanded beyond the border states. It will become the “multiple sales non-reporting loophole” and they will insist that all states need to follow the reporting requirements.

Firearms dealers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They want to honor and respect customers’ rights, but ATF controls their licenses and the laws and regulations hold dealers responsible for things they “should have known.” Dealers have to pass up business and/or alert ATF when they suspect possible criminal activity. Not doing so can have serious consequences. A New Mexico dealer is in jail today because the local police chief in the town of Columbus was allegedly trafficking guns to Mexico. The ATF says the dealer “should have known” so he is considered a co-conspirator. He could lose everything for selling guns to the Police Chief!

At the same time, gun owners can be very unforgiving of dealers who they perceive as “too cooperative” with ATF so dealers have to be careful about that too. Still, dealers don’t want to be selling guns to criminals as demonstrated during Operation Fast and Furious when dealers repeatedly expressed reservations about doing business with suspicious characters and ATF insisted that they go forward with sales. Mandatory multi-sale reporting increases dealers’ paperwork load, but relieves them of some judgment calls. It might make things generally easier on dealers in the short term, but it would probably make things worse for them in the long run.

Dogs, Children Or Bureaucrats Its A Mistake To Reward Bad Behavior

Perhaps the most important reason to deny ATF’s long-gun registration regulation is, as stated earlier, that whether you’re dealing with dogs, children, or bureaucrats, it is always a mistake to reward bad behavior. ATF and DOJ (including the US Attorney’s Office and possibly the FBI and DEA) behaved badly. They encouraged and forced sales of some 2000 firearms (that we know of) to known Mexican gun traffickers and then they turned their backs and allowed those guns to disappear into the black market and to crime scenes in Mexico and the US, including the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

They did this in violation of long-standing rules of operation and common sense as well as international law. They did not do this in response to weak US gun laws or a need for multi-gun reporting. These straw buyers were already known and under surveillance.

Politically motivated felony or just felony stupid, this was bad behavior any way you look at it and it should not be rewarded with increased authority, increased responsibility, and increased funding.

ATF, DOJ, the US Attorney’s Office, and any other agency involved in this fiasco need to be slapped down, not rewarded, and responsible individuals should be prosecuted.

Copyright © 2011 Neal Knox Associates – The most trusted name in the rights movement.

About:
The Firearms Coalition is a loose-knit coalition of individual Second Amendment activists, clubs and civil rights organizations. Founded by Neal Knox in 1984, the organization provides support to grassroots activists in the form of education, analysis of current issues, and with a historical perspective of the gun rights movement. The Firearms Coalition is a project of Neal Knox Associates, Manassas, VA. Visit: www.FirearmsCoalition.org

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ATF Overreaches Again – Threatens Your Gun Rights
By Jeff Knox

FirearmsCoalition.org

Manassas, VA --(Ammoland.com)- The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has a long history of excess and overreaching and they’re at it again.

Using exaggerated reports of gun smuggling from the US into Mexico as their justification, the agency has filed for an Emergency Regulation requiring gun dealers to keep track of their customers and file special reports to ATF whenever a customer purchases more than one semi-automatic rifle within any 5-day period.

Such special reporting is already required for multiple sales of handguns and has proven to be thoroughly useless as a law enforcement tool.

ATF’s requested regulation – which is unconstitutional, violates a statutory prohibition against firearms registration schemes, and was obviously filed as an “Emergency” simply as a means of bypassing Congress – would be “temporary,” meaning that it would have to be renewed in 4 or 5 months, and is said to only apply to gun dealers in states bordering Mexico, though the regulation, as submitted, seems to be missing that specific limitation.

ATF Overreaches Again – Threatens Rights **Volk

At this point the proposed regulation is awaiting approval from the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA.) Political observers will recall that OIRA is headed by President Obama’s old friend Cass Sunstein who famously advocated for the abolition of all hunting and for the extension of legal rights – including the right to have a court-appointed attorney – to animals. While Mr. Sunstein is an attorney and college professor specializing, in part, in constitutional law, his record shows that his Constitution does not include the Second Amendment. It is expected that Sunstein’s office will approve ATF’s Emergency Regulation by the first week of January unless there is immediate and vehement objection from members of Congress and the public.

In the late ’70s shortly after my late father, Neal Knox, took over the NRA’s lobbying efforts, ATF leaders attempted to expand their power by implementing a regulatory scheme requiring that gun manufacturers add a government-defined 13-digit serial number to every gun and that dealers report detailed information, including that new serial number, to ATF for every sale. Records of those sales, guns, and purchasers were to be stored in ATF computers.

It was gun registration, pure and simple.

The scheme might have slipped through had it not been for the heightened visibility of ATF due to Dad’s efforts and his immediate sounding of the alarm when the proposal was introduced.

Congress had upon numerous occasions debated the idea of a federal gun registration law and had rejected the idea on each occasion. For ATF to decide to bypass Congress and implement such a registration scheme via regulation was rightly perceived as an affront by many members of Congress and their indignant response was to remove some four million dollars from the agency’s operating budget (the amount ATF said they expected to spend on the scheme.)

That overreach, along with egregious abuses of honest gun dealers by the ATF led to the introduction of the McClure-Volkmer Firearms Owners Protection Act to repeal some of the more onerous and confusing sections of the Gun Control Act of 1968.

It is to be hoped that current members of Congress will have a similarly indignant response to ATF’s overreaching in this instance as here again the agency is trying to implement by regulation something which the Congress has considered and rejected in the past.

Rights opponents will argue that rights activists like me are overly sensitive and unyielding in our positions and that we reactively oppose any firearms regulations regardless of how benign or effective they may be. There will be an inclination to accept ideas like this and then place the burden of proof upon rights advocates to explain why it’s a bad idea. Really, the burden of proof belongs to those who wish to interfere with our rights. It is up to ATF to show the legal authority to institute this proposed regulation and that it does not violate the spirit or intent of any existing law. It is also up to the ATF to show that their proposed regulation will be effective and productive as a means of fighting illegal gun trafficking.

The fact is that ATF can present no such evidence in support of their idea, just the suggestion that the proposal sounds reasonable and might be of use. That’s not good enough.

It is overreaching for an agency to follow after Congress and enact regulations where Congress has refused to enact laws, especially where Congress considered and discarded those exact actions.

It is extra-legal for an agency to ignore statutory limitations barring the collection or archiving of information about gun purchasers, not to mention limitations under the Paperwork Reduction Act forbidding unnecessary increases in paperwork burdens.

The multiple-sales reporting scheme claims to be aimed at keeping guns out of Mexico, but it fails on that point as well. First, it will have little effect on gun smuggling in Mexico for smugglers familiarize themselves with the laws they are breaking. They will easily avoid ensnaring themselves in such an obvious trap. Second, while the actual number of guns that arrive in Mexico from the USA is impossible to determine, we know that the number being reported is inflated since the ATF only traces those guns selected by the Mexican authorities. There is strong evidence that American civilian gun shops are only one of many sources of guns in Mexico, and a minor one at that.

Pictures of confiscated arms in the Mexican press routinely include grenades, rocket launchers and heavy machine guns, arms that aren’t in the US civilian inventory.

Finally, the proposed multiple-sale scheme places a significant burden on dealers and puts them at increased risk of prosecution for clerical errors if they fail to detect a repeat buyer in a timely fashion.

You can tell the ATF and Congress that you oppose the ATF’s overreach through any − or all − of the following ways:

1. Call the Office of Management and Budget, Office of Information and Regulation Affairs, Department of Justice, Desk Officer at (202) 395-6466.
2. E-mail Barbara A. Terrell, ATF, Firearms Industry Programs Branch at Barbara.Terrell@atf.gov
3. Call your Senators and Representative: United States Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121.
   There is no such thing as reasonable infringement on liberty.

About:
The Firearms Coalition is a loose-knit coalition of individual Second Amendment activists, clubs and civil rights organizations. Founded by Neal Knox in 1984, the organization provides support to grassroots activists in the form of education, analysis of current issues, and with a historical perspective of the gun rights movement. The Firearms Coalition is a project of Neal Knox Associates, Manassas, VA. Visit: www.FirearmsCoalition.org

**Image: by Olegvolk.net

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