Gunleaders Blog

We have lost sight of the forest through the trees.  This article shows us some insight into what the ATF really does.  The theme of the article seems to be that operation gunwalker (the drive by media like to call it fast and furious) wasn’t intended to walk guns into Mexico and that the operation’s darling was, as his former partner allegedly referred to him, “an asshole”.

Yeah. if he or she is employed by ATF, that is a GIVEN.  The ATF mission is not noble.  It is their job to confiscate firearms and imprison gun owners.  If they can’t find the dirt to do this, they’ll make up the dirt.  These scumbags are the modern day American equivalent of the Nazi SS, only the ATF is indiscriminate in its hatred of gun owners.

Who cares whether the operation was intended to walk guns, it DID walk guns into Mexico with deadly consequences.

So, the article says -

Some call it the “parade of ants”; others the “river of iron.” The Mexican government has estimated that 2,000 weapons are smuggled daily from the U.S. into Mexico. The ATF is hobbled in its effort to stop this flow. No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking, so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws

Yet it took exactly 4 seconds for Google to bring up this, which was response number one.

Customers can legally buy as many weapons as they want in Arizona as long as they’re 18 or older and pass a criminal background check. There are no waiting periods and no need for permits, and buyers are allowed to resell the guns

What’s the point of this?  There’s no waiting period on posting a 750 word blog post either and the founding fathers clearly never envisioned the ability to publish biased opinion pieces with half truths and outright lies with such lightning like speed.

After initially supporting Group VII agents and denying the allegations, they have since agreed that the ATF purposefully chose not to interdict guns it lawfully could have seized.

So, which is it?  Did they intentionally walk guns or didn’t they?  If DOJ says they did purposefully not interdict the guns involved in the operation, are they lying?

Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case

Wow.  They must have gotten unprecedented cooperation from AG Holder.  Maybe they could share what they have with the House Oversight committee?

“ATF did not exercise proper oversight, planning or judgment in executing this case. We at ATF have accepted responsibility and have taken appropriate and decisive action to insure that these errors in oversight and judgment never occur again.”

Ok, so who are being charged as accomplices in Agent Terry’s murder?

Day after day, they visited local gun dealers and pored over forms called 4473s, which dealers must keep on file. These contain a buyer’s personal information, a record of purchased guns and their serial numbers, and a certification that the buyer is purchasing the guns for himself. (Lying on the forms is a felony, but with weak penalties attached.) The ATF agents manually entered these serial numbers into a database of suspect guns to help them build a picture of past purchases

So what you have here is a public admission that ATF agents were gathering serial numbers of weapons and other personal information in order to build a database of purchases.  This, ladies and gentlemen is called a “registry”.  We have talked about this before, and there have been a smattering of reports on this, recently in Alaska.  ATF will go around to gun shows, or stores and demand 4473’s.  They will then take the information, photo it, copy it or otherwise amass this information and enter it into a database.  In some cases they will interdict your sale, go to your house and your neighbors houses to inquire whether you’re suitable to own a gun; fishing for any reason they can fabricate a crime.  They did exactly this in Richmond & several other gun shows.  The common theme here is – They get the gun serial numbers and YOUR personal information.

They’re not getting rid of that information either.

So allegedly the AUSA took the position that multiple purchases weren’t a crime:

“[P]urchasing multiple long guns in Arizona is lawful,” Patrick Cunningham, the U.S. Attorney’s then–criminal chief in Arizona would later write. “Transferring them to another is lawful and even sale or barter of the guns to another is lawful unless the United States can prove by clear and convincing evidence that the firearm is intended to be used to commit a crime.”

So they were all gung-ho to put all that 4473 info into their “suspect gun owner database” but when it comes to entrapping otherwise innocent citizens, or using their goons to raid someone’s house for a paperwork violation … but there is 1 think that will absolutely stop the ATF in its tracks.  A government holiday.

It was the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, so the agents didn’t receive the fax until Tuesday, according to a contemporaneous case report. By that time, the legally purchased guns had been gone for three days. The agents had never seen the weapons and had no chance to seize them. But they entered the serial numbers into their gun database. Two of these were later recovered at Brian Terry’s murder scene

So allegedly prosecutors maintained a strict threshold for winnable cases and didn’t want losers.  Multiple purchases being legal and all, they were probably tired of hearing from the yapping Pomeranian of federal law enforcement trying desperately fabricate some kind of crime.

Phoenix-based ATF agents became so frustrated by prosecutors’ intransigence that, in a highly unusual move, they began bringing big cases to the state attorney general’s office instead. Terry Goddard, Arizona’s Attorney General from 2003 to 2011, says of federal prosecutors, “They demanded that every i be dotted, every t be crossed, and after a while, it got to be nonsensical.”

Nonsensical.  After all, it’s not like we’re talking about stripping someone of their freedom or anything.  What’s interesting is the article next goes into accusing Dodson, the so called gunwalker whistle blower of beginning the gun walking.  What’s important here is not who started it, who perpetuated it – they all work for ATF.  The important point here is what happened when the prosecutors told ATF multiple purchases was legal.  Instead of taking the hint, ATF doubled down, as they have repeatedly done throughout history.  They went back to the drawing board to fabricate a crime where there was none.  It’s this mentality of “get them on something, even if we have to make it up” is what got us gunwalker, wide receiver before it and a host of other ATF high profile operations with cool sounding names that ultimately ended up showing ATF for what it is.  It’s this institutional and adversarial mission that got us here.

So Katie Pavlich has responded, calling the Fortune article basically rubbish.  She may be right, but the overarching problem here isn’t Dodson, Voth, Melson, Holder- it’s the entire institution here. It’s not that they’re actually investigating crimes it’s that they’re trying to manufacture crimes.  Sure, the Gunwalker crew should all go to prison, but they won’t.  And Fortune clearly shows that when faced with a “non-crime” ATF decided they had to turn it into a crime.  They tried desperately to point the finger at US Gun dealers, fought hard for a rule change in the CFR to mandate reporting of LAWFUL sales of multiple rifles so they could add to their registry & when that didn’t work, they directly funneled guns into the hands of narco-terrorists and it got one of our citizens – A decorated Marine & Border Patrol agent, murdered.

Who cares whether Dodson wore shower shoes to work or was an asshole or whether Voth was too, or Melson?  What matters is ATF’s conduct as an organization.  Yes, punish the gunwalker crew but the takeaway from this has to be more.  The gun registry that ATF maintains needs to be eliminated.  These gun who stings, they have to go too.  In fact, there shouldn’t be ANY ATF undercover operations ever again.  They can investigate but they don’t need armed teams of raiders to do that mission. If they can convince ethical law enforcement agencies of a criminal violation, that agency can take the lead.  ATF has proven itself time and again to be incapable of operating within the law.  Why do gun owners just accept this?