A machine gun is like obscenity: We can’t define what it is, but everyone says they know it when they see it.
Well, that appears to be the case with the agency of the federal government formerly called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, anyway. According to a statement issued yesterday by the Gun Owners of America (GOA), “The Bureau has never published a manual detailing how they determine what is, or is not, a machine gun.”
If your main reason for existence is controlling weaponry like machine guns, shouldn’t the criteria for determining what a machine gun is be publicly known?
But the reason for the bureau itself is a bit iffy. Known (un)popularly as the “ATF,” it’s been in operation (in one form or another) since 1886. Ronald Reagan infamously dubbed it a rogue agency. Since then, the ATF has slogged through multiple scandals, and a major umbrella department change, moving from Treasury to Justice. And that iffiness has been exacerbated by recent investigations by the House Oversight Committee.
Indeed, in part based on the results of those investigations, the GOA now advocates getting rid of the agency— you can read the details in yesterday’s communiqué.
The group has a point. Recent ATF activity includes another of its weird attempts at entrapment, which ended up supplying a huge amount of guns to the Mexican drug cartels.
Another federal agency doing the opposite of its mission?
Not unheard of. Call it a typical misfire.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
4 replies on “ATF Misfire”
Sort of like the greeen jobs thing. Seems that all of the hybrids and electric cars actually create more pollution AND generate more CO2(not pollution) than conventional vehicles.
Or the TARP bailout and the stimulus billions that cost WAY more jobs in their sucking up tax dollars than they ever created. Or saved.
Or the Patriot Act which acts in a way that is the the antithesis of what the patriots that founded the country set up as patriotic.
Or the Department of “Justice” that was involved in creating a “river of iron” of guns smuggled into Mexico. for God knows what reason, and now is justifying covering it up.
About the only thing that has been not turned upside down is that Presbo has been consistantly busy at transforming this the greatest country in the world into something else, as he campaigned that he WOULD do.
The obvious solution under this adminstration is to change the name and have the same people work for a branch of a different or new agency, doing the same thing.
(Like they did with ACORN)
Gun Owners of America (GOA) is an advocacy organization for gun owners. Their voice in Washington will not be heard by those who seek to end our 2nd Amendment rights.
Fast & Furious was a horrible idea & I say, deliberately designed at inception, to create the appearance that gun sales from America were the primary problem fueling the violence in Mexico.
This was a deliberate attempt by a federal agency working w/ suspiciously influential radical special interest groups to end the 2nd Amendment right to Keep & Bear Arms in America.
The United Nations (UN) Small Arms Treaty may come up before the Senate any time. This treaty is the international gun grabbers way of circumventing our constitution & the rulings of our courts. It is despicable. And that members of our own government are working w/ these international socialist groups to take away our freedoms, is just as despicable.
Why a president who is supposedly a constitutional scholar, would even think he could just sign an international treaty to deny Americans their constitutional rights, is beyond me. Lets face it, if the founders wanted a president to have such powers, then why would the founders have even written a constitution at all??
No international treaty can usurp the constitution. While it is true the president can sign a treaty into law, if the Senate agrees w/ a treaty, there can be no question that such power does not extend to denial of the constitutional rights of American citizens. After all, if gun rights can be denied, then according to that false logic, ALL of our constitutional rights could be signed away by a president who had a compliant Senate.
Thats not only insane, its obscene!
That a president would want to circumvent our constitution, our legislature, our courts, and the will of the majority of Americans, speaks volumes to his credibility & to his commitment to being an American.
Along w/ efforts by the president to push a ‘stealth amnesty’ for illegal aliens, this president shows himself to have a total disregard for our constitution & for the whole concept of America.
The BATFE needs to be dismantled. There must be independent investigations of what many believe were illegal acts by management at the BATFE and at the Department of Justice (DOJ). Crimes may have been committed. The cooperative actions w/ outside special interest groups, smells of a RICO-like operation. And the deaths of American Agents with weapons that were part of the Fast & Furious scam, attach’s a serious liability to their despicable actions. The lies & roadblocks erected to stop congress from investigating must be crimes.
Appoint a Special Prosecutor & lets see who is indicted & who does jail time. I suggest the Attorney General is up to his eyeballs involved in this. I suggest he helped develop the entire plan & I also suggest, there are people inside the White House who were also involved.
What we have here folks, is really a constitutional crisis. We have a president who is not the product of natural born citizen “parents”, which means he was never eligible to even run for office. Many high up political leaders knew this, yet even after vetting McCain for this exact reason, they quietly decided they would not vet Obama, and they allowed him to run & take the oath knowing full well it was illegal according to the constitution. More than that, “if: Obama is the constitutional scholar we are told he is, then he obviously knew he was violating the law & he did so defiantly!
You’ve really ipmresesd me with that answer!