Tag Archives: ATF

Time to rebuild the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives

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…But should Obama gets what he wants, he’ll face another major challenge: his own Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Over the last three decades, gun activists and lawmakers have purposefully hindered the BATF and carefully molded the agency that enforces gun laws to serve their own interests, stunting the ATF’s budget, handicapping its regulatory authority, and keeping it effectively leaderless. The bureau Obama is counting on to lead his gun control push is a disaster…by Republican design.

The problems are obvious. The agency that Obama said “works most closely with state and local law enforcement to keep illegal guns out of the hands of criminals” has the same of number of agents as the Phoenix Police Department. Its budget has barely budged in decades (as the Department of Homeland Security has grown flush with post-9/11 funding). It has fewer investigators than it did in 1973. And its acting (and part-time) director, B. Todd Jones, commutes to work from Minneapolis, where he works fulltime as a US attorney. It hasn’t had a permanent director for six years. The NRA blocked Obama’s earlier appointee, Andrew Traver, in part because Traver had once attended a meeting of police chiefs that focused on gun control. At the unveiling of his gun violence prevention package, Obama announced he would seek to make Jones the permanent (and presumably fulltime) chief of the ATF.

To understand how the ATF became the weakest of law enforcement agencies, you have to go back to President Ronald Reagan’s first term.

Read more: Flashback: How Republicans and the NRA Kneecapped the ATF | Mother Jones


  
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Jon Stewart explains how Republicans, the Patriot Act, and the NRA have made it impossible for the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms) to enforce sensible gun control.

Working for the ATF must be a slice of heaven. Read this:

Wyoming Ban On Federal Gun Bans Proposed By State Lawmaker – State Rep. Kendell Kroeker (R-Evansville) has put forward a bill making it a felony to enforce in Wyoming any federal ban on assault weapons or high-capacity gun magazines, two proposals that Biden’s gun control task force is likely to present to President Barack Obama on Tuesday. The task force’s recommendations, of course, would have to be passed by Congress and signed by Obama in order to become law. Kroeker said his bill, which would hit federal agents with up to five years in prison and a $50,000 fine for attempting to enforce such bans in Wyoming, is designed to be proactive in preserving gun rights.

More guns

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“When law enforcement officers recover a gun and serial number, workers at the bureau’s National Tracing Center here — a windowless warehouse-style building on a narrow road outside town — begin making their way through a series of phone calls, asking first the manufacturer, then the wholesaler and finally the dealer to search their files to identify the buyer of the firearm.

About a third of the time, the process involves digging through records sent in by companies that have closed, in many cases searching by hand through cardboard boxes filled with computer printouts, hand-scrawled index cards or even water-stained sheets of paper.

In an age when data is often available with a few keystrokes, the A.T.F. is forced to follow this manual routine because the idea of establishing a central database of gun transactions has been rejected by lawmakers in Congress, who have sided with the National Rifle Association, which argues that such a database poses a threat to the Second Amendment. In other countries, gun rights groups argue, governments have used gun registries to confiscate the firearms of law-abiding citizens.”

— Legislative Handcuffs Limit A.T.F.’s Ability to Fight Gun Crime – NYTimes.com (via diegueno)

BEFORE YOU BLAME THE NRA exclusively for the primitive bullshit method of tracing guns that we have in America — because there is no centralized database of gun ownership (or distribution / sales) — remember who the NRA represents and publicly takes the heat for: gun manufacturers. 


image gop-circus

Fast & Furious: the NRA (aka the GOP-led House) votes this week to hold AG Holder in contempt

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Fast and Furious in a nutshell: “U.S. guns have been widely used by Mexican drug cartels. While U.S. gun dealers aren’t supposed to sell weapons to the cartels, a lot of dealers have been selling guns to straw purchasers who smuggle the guns to the cartels. The ATF could arrest and prosecute some individual gun smuggler, but solving the problem requires building a case against the big fish gun dealers who know their guns are going to the cartels. The idea was to follow the little guys until they meet up with the big bad guys. This sometimes meant preventing local law enforcement from arresting the guy they were using as bait. In the end, they were supposed to…arrest everybody and grab all the guns. Then they could build a legal case against some seriously bad guys.” Read more 

Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan of Politico report this morning: “[T]he House is expected Thursday to vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to fork over thousands of pages of internal Justice Department documents detailing why federal officials allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. [...] If the House approves the measure, it will be the first time in U.S. history that one of the chambers has voted to hold a sitting attorney general in contempt. Adding to the political pressure: The National Rifle Association said in a letter to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) that it would use the contempt vote in its influential political scorecard.“

From a former ATF agent: “The National Rifle Association (NRA), one of the most powerful lobbies in the US, has relentlessly tried to destroy the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) since it was created in 1972. They came close under Ronald Reagan in 1981, when the NRA pushed legislation to abolish the agency. Realizing that federal gun law enforcement would transfer to the then much esteemed Secret Service, the NRA scuttled the proposal. [... the NRA's] support of the national database for criminal background checks was conditioned on prohibiting local ATF offices or other law enforcement agencies from accessing this information… the NRA also required that all records pertaining to the background checks be immediately destroyed. The NRA’s Republican allies in congress also blocked legislation that would ban cop-killer bullets and assault weapons and close the gun show loopholes.”

Republican Rep. Darrell Issa admitted yesterday: The congressman heading an investigation into a botched gun-trafficking case said on Sunday he had no evidence the White House was involved in a cover-up about the operation or in providing misleading information to Congress. That’s despite what “several Republican lawmakers, including House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), charged last week that President Obama’s decision to invoke executive privilege over documents related to the probe suggested that top administration officials were involved in withholding information.”

History: ATF ran a series of “gunwalking” sting operations between 2006 and 2011. This was done under the umbrella of Project Gunrunner, a project intended to stem the flow of firearms into Mexico by interdicting straw purchasers and gun traffickers within the United States…

Chris Weyant/The Hill (06/21/2012) via: randomactsofchaos

Everyone needs to be armed, though

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Just as Margaret Anderson’s death represents the first LEO down for 2012, this incident may reflect the sad statistic of being the last LEO down for 2011 — federal agent killed by “friendly fire”:

SEAFORD, N.Y. (AP) – An off-duty federal agent who died after intervening in a pharmacy robbery on New York’s Long Island was likely shot by a retired police officer who responded, a law enforcement official said Tuesday

ATF agent John Capano, 51, was shot Saturday in Seaford while struggling with a suspect during a robbery for prescription painkillers and cash at a small family pharmacy. Capano was a customer and followed the suspect, who was later shot and killed, as he tried to flee.

A retired Nassau County police lieutenant who runs a nearby deli and an off-duty New York City police officer in the deli ran to the scene and saw the skirmish between Capano and the suspect, later identified as James McGoey, 43, of Hampton Bays.

The law enforcement official said it is believed the retired Nassau officer shot Capano during the skirmish. The NYPD officer shot the suspect.

The official is familiar with the investigation but not authorized to release information and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. A Nassau County police spokesman declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.

The shooting appears to be the second so-called friendly fire in Nassau County in 2011. In March, an officer with the MTA Police shot and killed a Nassau police officer in plainclothes in Massapequa Park.

Everyone needs to carry. We’d all be safer!

The hypocrisy of the Republican party: ATF and gun-trafficking stings — Bush vs. Obama

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Apparently there was a second Bush-era gun-trafficking sting operation in which ATF allowed weapons to cross the border into Mexico in hopes of tracking them to high-level smugglers. Doesn’t sound like any more of a good idea then than when ATF under Obama launched another such sting. The difference is Republicans are pillorying the Obama administration for it.  (via David Kurtz)

THE LESSON HERE, AND ONE WE’RE ALL FAMILIAR WITH, is that Republicans and the right wing Teaparty will have a problem with something ONLY when a Democrat is president. Otherwise, it’s all good. Invading Iraq without reason, and without any legal consequences for anyone in the Bush Administration (and without any outrage from American conservatives, then or now), will always be the definitive confirmation of such right wing hypocrisy. Everything else is bullet points.

America’s (and Russia’s) Smallpox Virus Stores: where will they be kept?

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Looks like we have plenty of deadly viruses, nerve agents, chemical and biological weapons, and bloodborne pathogens all around the country to get the Rapture going if God won’t.

WHO Grants Smallpox A Reprieve: NPR

The World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization, agreed to put off making up its mind on when to destroy the two remaining stocks of the virus until a meeting in 2014.

Back in the ’90s, WHO experts had recommended the virus be obliterated. Smallpox, after all, had been declared eradicated in 1980, and nobody wants to risk an accidental release of the virus back into the wild.

But the United States and Russia, which hold the last known stores of the deadly virus, weren’t so keen on the idea and wanted smallpox preserved for at least five more years.

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That should be no problem. Except three months ago in Utah…

(Reuters) – A mix-up over a tiny vial of a deadly nerve agent led to the overnight lock-down of the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground, a sprawling, remote base in Utah where the U.S. military conducts weapons tests, officials said on Thursday.

[...] A routine lab inventory on Wednesday indicated that a small quantity of VX nerve agent was missing, prompting the base commander to shut down the installation as a precaution while a search was conducted, according to a statement by the base.

[...] More than 1,000 employees were forced to remain within the confines of the 798,000-acre installation after their shifts ended during the shutdown on Wednesday and early Thursday. But no one was injured in the episode.

“The agent in question has been accounted for, and no one was ever in any danger,” the base statement said. “All personnel are uninjured and safe. The public is safe as well.”

The Proving Ground, covering a swath of desert about the size of Rhode Island some 90 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, is the Army’s principal facility for testing of conventional munitions as well as chemical and biological weapons.

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And a couple of weeks ago in Maryland — a dead scientist:

One killed in explosion at Aberdeen Proving Grounds “Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense” lab

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Body of Contractor Killed in Aberdeen Proving Grounds Explosion will be flown back to his native India Monday. ATF is investigating. (Emphasis mine):

As the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives continues investigating the explosion at Aberdeen Proving Ground last Saturday that killed contractor Dr. Nanaj Bhamare, a friend of the worker has told Patch that Bhamare’s body will be flown back to India for burial.

[...] “They also requested our assistance due to the complexity of the explosives, fire scene,” [Clare A. Weber, a representative from the ATF field office in Baltimore] said of APG. “In addition to the explosion, then subsequent fire, the scene contained chem, bio-hazards as well as bloodborne pathogens, which ATF has better capabilities to handle.”

The explosion and subsequent fire happened yesterday about 3:00 PM EST at a lab in the Edgewood area of the installation — specifically the Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense laboratory. No one else was injured. Bhamare was a subcontractor to Battelle under an Army contract, and had been working at APG for only a couple of months.

It makes you wonder.