A Colorado Senate committee on Monday passed a measure that bans ammunition magazines of more than 15 rounds after several hours of testimony from a barrage of experts, law enforcement officials and victims of mass shootings.
House Bill 1224 passed on 3-2 party line vote and moves to the Senate floor on Friday.
There’s no such thing as a pro-gun Democrat. Most of the rest of the story is Democrats saying how they want to save teh chidrenz from teh gunz; and the usual leftist-statist “needs” for expansion of government power and restriction on the citizen.
Republican senators saved special scrutiny for David Chipman, a former agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms who testified in support of the bill. Chipman said the limit on magazine sizes would stop some shooters from becoming “killing machines.”
But Sen. Steve King, a Grand Junction Republican and a career police officer, tore into Chipman, asking him if he’d ever shot someone or been shot at.
“I have not,” Chipman said.
Considering that the ATF is responsible for more murders than a dozen Sandy Hooks, it might’ve been worth questioning him on what the effects of monopoly of force by the state are as well.
People who want to commit murder will commit murders. The Aurora, CO movie theater killer went to the trouble of booby-trapping his apartment with all kinds of incendiary devices. The Bath School Disaster, still the largest school mass murder in US history, was not done with a gun.
It will stop nothing, it will save no one, and it will endanger many people who rely on modern tools for self defense. Of course, they are the unseen costs – the lives lost because they couldn’t defend themselves also go ignored.
…Collins couldn’t aim her gun at the serial rapist who attacked her at the University of Nevada at Reno, where she was a student. That’s because, like most public colleges outside of Utah and Colorado, UNR is a “gun free” zone. The rule required her to leave her gun at home, leaving her defenseless the one time she needed its protection most.
In October of 2007, while walking to her car after a night class, Collins was grabbed from behind in a university parking garage less than 300 yards from a campus police office. The school’s “gun-free” designation meant nothing to James Biela, a serial rapist with a gun of his own, who saw Collins as an easy target. “He put a firearm to my temple,” she recounted, “clocked off the safety, and told me not to say anything, before he raped me.”
The university has since installed more emergency call boxes and lights in the parking structure, but Collins says that won’t stop an attacker who knows the campus is a gun-free zone, a policy she believes invites crime, and may have even emboldened the man who raped her.
Just months later, Biela went on to murder 19-year old Brianna Dennison in a case that received widespread national attention. While Biela now sits on death row, Collins is convinced the outcome would have been different had she been armed.
“I know, having been the first victim, that Brianna Dennison would still be alive, had I been able to defend myself that night.“
LAPD Spree Killer’s Supposed Full Manifesto Shows Support For Gun Control And President Obama
Police asked a Los Angeles Fox affiliate to remove the manifesto, originally reported to be that of alleged gunman Christopher Dorner, shortly after publishing.
The request from police indicates media outlets have been distributing and reporting on a highly edited version of the manifesto.
What’s missing are all the pro-leftist and pro-progressive talking points, already noted here and here.
Sooper Mexican has the whole thing (minus a bit of personal info). He notes that there are a lot of sections that disappeared from the mainstream media’s reporting. Some interesting highlights:
Mr. Vice President, do your due diligence when formulating a concise and permanent national AWB plan. Future generations of Americans depend on your plan and advisement to the president. I’ve always been a fan of yours and consider you one of the few genuine and charismatic politicians. Damn, sounds like an oxymoron calling you an honest politician. It’s the truth.
Hillary Clinton. You’ll make one hell of a president in 2016. Much like your husband, Bill, you will be one of the greatest. Look at Castro in San Antonio as a running mate or possible secretary of state. He’s (good people) and I have faith and confidence in him. Look after Bill. He was always my favorite President. Chelsea grew up to be one hell of an attractive woman. No disrespect to her husband.
Wayne LaPierre, President of the NRA, you’re a vile and inhumane piece of shit. You never even showed 30 seconds of empathy for the children, teachers, and families of Sandy Hook. You deflected any type of blame/responsibility and directed it toward the influence of movies and the media. You are a failure of a human being. May all of your immediate and distant family die horrific deaths in front of you.
Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Pat Harvey, Brian Williams, Soledad Obrien, Wolf Blitzer, Meredith Viera, Tavis Smiley, and Anderson Cooper, keep up the great work and follow Cronkite’s lead. I hold many of you in the same regard as Tom Brokaw and the late Peter Jennings. Cooper, stop nagging and berating your guest, they’re your (guest). Mr. Scarborough, we met at McGuire’s pub in P-cola in 2002 when I was stationed there. It was an honor conversing with you about politics, family, and life.
If you continuously followed me while I was walking at dusk/night I would confront you as well. Too bad Trayvon didn’t smash your skull completely open, Zim.
He also has an entire section basically dedicated to making himself into a martyr for gun control (sentence breaks added, some crap removed to make it clearer):
If you had a well regulated AWB, this would not happen. The time is now to reinstitute a ban that will save lives. Why does any sportsman need a 30 round magazine for hunting? Why does anyone need a suppressor? Why does anyone need a AR15 rifle? This is the same small arms weapons system utilized in eradicating Al Qaeda, Taliban, and every enemy combatant since the Vietnam war. …
All the firearms utilized in my activities are registered to me and were legally purchased at gun stores and private party transfers. All concealable weapons (pistols) were also legally register in my name at police stations or FFL’s.
Unfortunately, are you aware that I obtained class III weapons (suppressors) without a background check thru NICS or DROS completely LEGALLY several times? I was able to use a trust account that I created on quicken will maker and a $10 notary charge at a mailbox etc. to obtain them legally. Granted, I am not a felon, nor have a DV misdemeanor conviction or active TRO against me on a NCIC file. I can buy any firearm I want, but should I be able to purchase these class III weapons (SBR’s, and suppressors) without a background check and just a $10 notary signature on a quicken will maker program? The answer is NO. I’m not even a resident of the state i purchased them in. Lock n Load just wanted money so they allow you to purchase class III weapons with just a notarized trust, military ID.
NFA and ATF need new laws and policies that do not allow loopholes such as this. In the end, I hope that you will realize that the small arms I utilize should not be accessed with the ease that I obtained them. Who in there right mind needs a fucking silencer!!! who needs a freaking SBR AR15? No one. No more Virginia Tech, Columbine HS, Wisconsin temple, Aurora theatre, Portland malls, Tucson rally, Newtown Sandy Hook. Whether by executive order or thru a bi-partisan congress an assault weapons ban needs to be re-instituted. Period!!!
…
Mia Farrow said it best. “Gun control is no longer debatable, it’s not a conversation, its a moral mandate.”
Sen. Feinstein, you are doing the right thing in leading the re-institution of a national AWB. Never again should any public official state that their prayers and thoughts are with the family. That has become cliche’ and meaningless. Its time for action. Let this be your legacy that you bestow to America. Do not be swayed by obstacles, antagaonist, and naysayers. Remember the innocent children at Austin, Kent, Stockton, Fullerton, San Diego, Iowa City, Jonesboro, Columbine, Nickel Mines, Blacksburg, Springfield, Red Lake, Chardon, Aurora, and Newtown. Make sure this never happens again!!!
In my cache you will find several small arms. In the cache, Bushmaster firearms, Remington precision rifles, and AAC Suppressors (silencers). All of these small arms are manufactured by Cerberus/Freedom Group. The same company responsible for the Portland mall shooting, Webster , NY, and Sandy Hook massacre.
So he thinks he’ll be the madman that goes off and kills a whole lot of people to prove that if you trust anyone with guns, there will be murders. So because he decided to be a madman, a martyr for the cause, then the government must crack down on everyone. He complains about the LAPD being corrupt, but then decides to go on a murdering rampage… so he can make the LAPD more powerful. He’s a nut.
All it proves is you can’t trust cops or even military officers with guns, because they might go on some crazed manifesto-driven rampage and murder all kinds of people out of spite.
Update: He’s also got supporters now, who love that he went out and killed the daughter of his old captain… because murdering people who’ve done you no wrong is how the weakling powerless Sandy Hook shitbags of the world deal with their problems. Like Dorner, and like these assholes on Twitter.
He also notes he likes George W. Bush’s neocon-ness. So he’s a progressive, as well as a leftist race-card playing “I’m a victim” murdering shitbag who lashes out in a temper tantrum like Adam Lanza or Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold or any other of the petulant spree murderers he thinks he’s nothing like.
The five worst mass killings, where a firearm was used, have a common thread. Hint #1: They didn’t belong to the NRA. They don’t fit the stereotype of the “red-neck” gun owner.
Ft Hood: Registered Democrat/Muslim.
Columbine: Too young to vote; both families were registered Democrats and progressive liberals.
Virginia Tech: Wrote hate mail to President Bush and to his staff.
Colorado Theater: Registered Democrat; staff worker on the Obama campaign; Occupy Wall Street participant; progressive liberal.
Connecticut School Shooter: Registered Democrat; hated Christians.
Common thread is that all of these shooters were progressive liberal Democrats.
Also, of the worst killings in the last several decades, only one was a female, all the rest were boys, barely men. Their role models were rappers, action movies, comics and violent video games.
Our problem isn’t weapons, it’s boys without boundaries. Who live in ‘progressive’ households.
I was planning to post a bit more about how the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious had led to just about zero with regards to repercussions for the perpetrators, and how their criminal enterprise that armed Mexican narcoterrorists had led to the deaths of hundreds of Mexican citizens and US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, who died two years ago tonight, killed by a gun smuggled by his own government.
And then today, a lunatic in Connecticut went out and killed his mother, some teachers, and a class full of kindergarteners. There are no words available to console the families, and even stating that one can cannot convey sorrow sounds trite and cliche. There really is no way to convey the unfathomable sorrow and grief and shock that the families are in right now, or to convey aid in any words. There is nothing that can be said to console them. With time, perhaps one could offer a shoulder to lean on, arms to cry in, and ears to listen. Today, there is nothing.
Today’s lunatic criminal is on the level of the Port Arthur Massacre, in which an Australian man, who was reportedly driven in part by the media reports of the Scottish Dunblane School Massacre, to go out and commit a greater act of violence. Already a madman, he identified another madman and sought to outdo the lunatic in Scotland. By the end of the Port Arthur Massacre, 35 people had been murdered and 23 more wounded.
The effects would be long-lasting, as the Australian government reacted in knee-jerk fashion by going after their citizens’ gun rights. Some classes of firearms were outright banned, others regulated and regulated until they drove out hobbyists, competitive shooters, and those who believed in Orwell’s statement that the rifle on the cabin wall insures democracy. Today, Australia has incredibly strict gun control laws, which, as usual, only have an effect on law-abiding citizens. The end result was that one madman’s rampage and a knee-jerk reaction from government resulted in harm for the entire nation.
Today, with the president, already known to be vehemently anti-gun, crying and saying that action MUST be taken, we stand on that same precipice, under threat of loss of rights.
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When I was in college, I took many Russian culture, history, and language classes. One day in early 1999, a professor told us of how when she was a student in Russia decades before, she had a professor who spoke of US aid to Russia during WWII. The professor had spoken well of lend-lease and of how the United States had aided the Soviet Union during the war years. The professor was soon gone, whisked away by the government.
In April of 1999, two lunatics at Columbine High School in Colorado shot up their school, killing classmates and teachers and eventually themselves. In class, my professor spoke about it, wistfully noting how it was terrible that kids could get guns and how that would never happen in the old country.
I reminded her of the story of her professor that she had told us just a few days prior, and how he had been “disappeared”, along with hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of people by the state. In a moment, she understood, and replied simply with “oh”.
None of the lives lost at Columbine were any less important than those sent to camps to die – all were human lives killed by malevolent forces. The difference is that one malevolent force – that of a murderous madman, can never be truly contained or completely mitigated. Every single death at the hands of a madman is tragic, but ultimately a madman is limited in scale. In contrast, the malevolent force of a murderous government is nigh unlimited in scale, and can last not merely for the course of a single rampage, but can last for years, decades, and generations, committing murders on a scale that no lone madman or pair of lunatics can possibly match.
With that simple comparison, she understood in an instant that the power of a government can be held in check by an armed populace (and even a madman can sometimes be held in check by an armed populace, as seen at the New Life Church in Colorado, the Appalachian Law School, and even at the University of Texas tower shooting). The loss of life from a government with monopoly of force vastly outweighs that of individual criminals across the history of mankind; and the good citizen being disarmed enables criminal and evil men, and criminal and evil governments.
None of this is consolation to the victims of an individual madman or criminal, but it needs to be brought up as a reminder that any knee-jerk response to blame tools of a massacre cannot stop future massacres; but that denying free men the right to bear arms can ensure that there will be future massacres.
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If you’ve never seen this before, please take a few minutes to watch. The woman speaking is Dr. Suzanna Hupp, who survived the Luby’s Massacre in Kileen, TX. Both of her parents were murdered there.
“The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting, and I know I’m not going to make very many friends saying this, but it’s about our right, all of our right to be able to protect ourselves from all of you guys up there.”
-Dr. Suzanna Hupp
–
Update: The written word has no tone, only that which a skillful writer can imbue, and an adept reader can discern. Upon rereading this post, I want to make sure it isn’t read in a tone that sounds harsh or callous. The first part is to those suffering; and to them I would say little else. No one can. The second and following parts are to everyone else, standing back from the situation even if a bit, and beginning to think about the longer view. Even that in and of itself may sound callous.
In 2005, friends in my platoon were hit by an IED and injured. Two received Purple Hearts for what we would ultimately learn were minor injuries, but that was unknown to us at the time. My response to their injuries was to push on, repair damage my vehicle had incurred and address what I could do. I had no control over what happened to my injured friends, as I have no control over the injured, traumatized, and grieving here. Nothing I can do can aid them (prayer may help, but I don’t wear that on my sleeve). The only thing I can perhaps do is offer some perspective and prevent greater tragedy in the very long run.
Any knee-jerk response against guns may be well-intentioned by some, but is purely controlling, malicious, and calculated by others. Any knee-jerk response towards greater control by mental health professionals as an attempt to prevent madmen from going on rampages needs to address the fact that the mental health profession lives in a glass house.
There will be time to understand what all went wrong (some reports note that after classes began, the school was locked down, which leads to wondering how does a madman in tactical gear carrying guns get buzzed in), but there will be some more eager to “never let a good crisis go to waste” in the words of Barack Obama’s former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
As gun owners, if we could just experience the grief and sorrow along with the rest of the country, instead of having it intruded upon by that impending feeling of doom about what the media, the politicians, and the people in society who don’t much care for civilian gun ownership are going to do to our lives, liberty and often times livelihood? If we could go through something like this without worrying how much we’re going to be the scapegoats? I know that’s the thought that’s been crossing my mind as this entire horror story is playing out in the media. I don’t want to think about or deal with politics right now, but that’s precisely what I have to start getting ready for if I don’t want to risk that America, and the politicians who claim to represent her, in their rashest and most impulsive worst instincts, pass a knee jerk law that will overnight turn many Americans into instant felons. There are times I believe we all deserve a break from politics. This is one of them, but we will never get it.
I believe we will not leave this horror unscathed, either mentally or politically. Our liberties and beliefs will be called into question, ridiculed, beaten, and we’ll be told to get in line for the good of everyone. This could very well be the point as which the pendulum swings back. The narrative that’s been driven home is that NRA is beaten up and bloodied, and is no longer relevant. Regardless of whether that’s true or not, what matters is what the powers that be believe. We may not believe the time now is for politics, and it shouldn’t be. But as a variation on an old saying goes: we may not be interested much in politics, but politics is very interested in us.
Reposted in its entirety, because it’s so much worth reading to understand the sentiment.
Two U.S. Border Patrol agents were shot, one fatally, Tuesday morning in an area in south Arizona known as a major drug-smuggling corridor, authorities said.
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The identities of the agents were not immediately released, but the shooting occurred at the Brian Terry Station near Naco, Ariz., which is just south of Tucson. The station was named after an agent who was killed in the line of duty in December 2010. The area is considered a remote part of the state and sources tell Fox News that the shooting occurred at 1:50 a.m. local time and about 8 miles from the border.
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The injured agent was airlifted to a hospital with nonlife-threatening injuries. The injured agent was shot in the ankle and buttocks, the Department of Homeland Security said.
The search for the killer is being led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office. The area is currently flooded with agents on horseback and helicopters conducting a search for the suspects.
Three horse patrol agents had responded to a sensor and were jumped by a rip crew, bandits who prey on drug and alien smugglers. The injured agent will most likely survive, though it will be a long, hard push through physical therapy, and a third was unharmed.
Seeing as how the attack took place only 8 miles from the border, the rip crew stands a good chance of having already escaped into Mexico.
I’m sure somewhere, the ATF is very, very, very worried that another of their Fast and Furious guns will turn up at the murder of a Border Patrol Agent.
Nearly forty years later, another “scandal,” exponentially larger than Watergate, has the potential to bring down the occupant of the oval office along with other high ranking officials. While no one was murdered as a result of Watergate, two law enforcement officers are dead because of the current “scandal” that is leading closer and closer to the highest levels of the Obama administration, including the Department of Justice and the U.S. State Department.
News about Operation “Fast and Furious” is now ubiquitous. Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson’s Fourth of July testimony to Senator Charles Grassley and Representative Darrell Issa blew the cover off what appears to be one of the biggest political cover-ups in the last 50 years.
In the middle of it is Attorney General Eric Holder, who now feigns a blissful ignorance about the whole mess: having nothing to say about its beginnings as Operation “Gunrunner” or its latest incarnation as “Fast and Furious.”
For those who might not know, Operation “Gunrunner” was the plan to sell guns to “straw purchasers” with suspected ties to the Mexican cartel. Apparently, ATF was then banking on those purchasers to walk the guns across the border into Mexico. Operation “Fast and Furious” was the plan to follow those guns until they were in cartel hands and then make apprehensions. (For the record, I concur with those who believe this was all an attempt to flood the border with weapons in order to create a degree of chaos sufficient to convince us of the supposed-need for more gun control in America.)
Anyway, the problem with Holder’s feigned ignorance is that he gave a speech in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 2, 2009, in which he boasted about Operation “Gunrunner” and told Mexican authorities of everything he was doing to insure its success.
An email cited in Senator Charles Grassley’s testimony in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Operation Fast and Furious indicates that knowledge of the program was spread across the highest levels of the Justice Department. This lends even greater suspicion to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s claim that he knew nothing about the program until well after Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed.
The October 27, 2009 email from ATF Phoenix Field Division Special Agent in Charge (SAC) William Newell regarded a Southwest Border Strategy Group meeting that focused on Fast and Furious. It contained a laundry list of high ranking Justice Department officials that attended the meeting, including:
Assistant Attorney General (Criminal Division) Lanny Breuer,
Ultimately, the operation led to the murder of two U.S. federal agents and an estimated 150 Mexican law enforcement officers and soldiers. The strong implication is that those individuals and agencies responsible for allowing Gunwalker to proceed aided and abetted murder, committing felonies as accessories before the fact.
Such serious charges, potentially reaching the highest levels of the Department of Justice and possibly higher, should not be undertaken by an acting inspector general, which is typically a caretaker role until a new inspector general has been appointed.
Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) made that very observation in a March 8 letter to Kevin L. Perkins, chair of the Integrity Committee for the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency.
The ABC15 Investigators uncovered documents showing guns connected to at least two Glendale criminal cases and at least two Phoenix criminal cases also appear in the ATF’s Suspect Gun Database, a sort-of watch list for suspicious gun sales.
All four cases involve drug-related offenses. In one Glendale police report dated July 2010, police investigators working with DEA agents served search warrants at homes near 75th and Glendale avenues in Glendale, and 43rd and Glendale avenues in Phoenix as part of a “large scale marijuana trafficking” investigation.
Police investigators reported they “obtained information that members of the (trafficking) organization were using the homes…as stash houses used to store large amounts of marijuana temporarily.”
They reported finding hundreds of pounds of marijuana, more than $63,000 in U.S. currency and three guns inside the homes. One of the recovered weapons, a Romarm/Cugir WASR-10 rifle, appeared in an official ATF Suspect Gun Summary document in November 2009, proving agents knowingly allowed the suspicious gun sale, months before the weapon turned up at the crime scene.
According to court paperwork, Phoenix Drug Enforcement Administration agents discovered the guns in mid-April. They pulled over a vehicle near 83rd Avenue and Interstate 10, near the Phoenix and Tolleson border.
Documents filed in federal court reveal five suspects named in the case are accused of conspiring to possess and distribute “500 grams or more of a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of methamphetamine…”
Four of the suspects are listed as undocumented immigrants. The fifth suspect had been admitted to the United States under a non-immigrant visa, according to court documents.
Virginia O’Brien, Special Agent in Charge at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Tampa Field Division, ran a gun-running investigation that was walking guns to Honduras using the techniques and tactics identical to Fast and Furious, it was reported to these correspondents this evening via private correspondence from a proven credible source.
Some folks on AR15.com mention that the timing of Operation Castaway and the illegal walking of guns to Honduras by the ATF may have coincided with Honduran President Manuel Zelaya’s decision to make an illegal referendum on allowing him to serve a second term. Honduras’ Constitution limits presidents to one term in an effort to prevent a dictatorship from developing, and Honduras’ Supreme Court ordered the Honduran Army to remove Zelaya, who found refuge in Venezeula… the same place he was going to acquire (already-filled-out) ballots from.
John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, has this piece at FOX News on 7/8 asking when will the Obama Administration come clean on Gunwalker – since there can be no good behind any motivations here:
Here are just some of the questions that the Obama administration still has not answered:
1. Why would the government go through with the policy when it was seemingly obvious to everyone that there was no law-enforcement benefit to the operation?
2. Why won’t the Obama administration remove Acting Director Ken Melson from continuing to run the agency?
For an additional amount for ‘State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance’, $40,000,000, for competitive grants to provide assistance and equipment to local law enforcement along the Southern border and in High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas to combat criminal narcotics activity stemming from the Southern border, of which $10,000,000 shall be transferred to ‘Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Salaries and Expenses’ for the ATF Project Gunrunner.
Cefalu said the operation was never about actually arresting cartel members for arms trafficking, it was about headlines for the ATF and its upper echelons, more budget, more gun control, and more media attention for ATF:
There’s no Mister Big in Mexico, there’s no … Iron Pipeline. It doesn’t exist.
When everybody is screaming terrorism and counterterrorism no one wants to talk to anyone but the FBI. If there’s gunrunning on the border and thousands of guns flowing into Mexico it’s more headlines for ATF.
So if the identities of the Mexican criminals were known to the feds, what was the point of Project Gunrunner — and why is Holder so desperately trying to stonewall by withholding hundreds of documents from Congress?
Law-abiding gun owners and dealers think they already know. With the Obama administration wedded to the fiction that 90 percent of the guns Mexican cartels use originate here — they don’t — many suspect that “Fast and Furious” was a backdoor attempt to smear domestic gun aficionados as part of its stealth efforts on gun control by executive fiat.
“I just want you to know that we’re working on it,” Obama was quoted as saying to gun-control advocate Sarah Brady in March. “We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”
Unfortunately for the administration, this one’s out in the open now.
Melson testified behind closed doors on July 4, but the country needs to hear him speak — loudly and publicly. “Let me be clear,” Issa wrote to Melson in April, “we are not conducting a concurrent investigation with the Department of Justice, but rather an independent investigation of the Department of Justice.“
The most damning revelations coming out of the hearings on Operation Fast and Furious held by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform are the unmistakable indications that the program was never designed to succeed as a law enforcement operation at all.
A quartet of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) agents and supervisors turned into whistleblowers to bring the operation down, but only after U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was gunned down in the Arizona desert. Two of the weapons recovered at the scene of Terry’s murder were traced to the operation.
Fast and Furious, also known by the more accurate “Gunwalker,” allowed known straw purchasers to buy large quantities of firearms — often a dozen or more semi-automatic rifles — at a time with the full knowledge of ATF agents and executives. The guns were then smuggled into Mexico, as frustrated front-line ATF agents watched, under strict orders to do nothing.
ATF agents testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee could not explain how the operation was supposed to succeed when their surveillance efforts stopped at the border and interdiction was never an option.
ATF Agent John Dodson, testifying in front of the committee, said that in his entire law enforcement career, he had “never been involved in or even heard of an operation in which law enforcement officers let guns walk.” He continued: “I cannot begin to think of how the risk of letting guns fall into the hands of known criminals could possibly advance any legitimate law enforcement interest.”
The obvious answer is that Gunwalker’s objective was never intended to be a “legitimate law enforcement interest.” Instead, it appears that ATF Acting Director Ken Melson and Department of Justice senior executives specifically created an operation that was designed from the outset to arm Mexican narco-terrorists and increase violence substantially along both sides of the Southwest border.
Success was measured not by the number of criminals being incarcerated, but by the number of weapons transiting the border and the violence those weapons caused. An ATF manager was “delighted” when Gunwalker guns started showing up at drug busts. It would be entirely consistent with this theory if DOJ communications reflected the approval of the ATF senior officials they were colluding with — but as we know, Holder’s Department of Justice refuses to cooperate.
At the same time in 2009 that federal law enforcement agencies (the ATF, the DOJ, and presumably Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security) were creating the operation that led to the executive branch being the largest gun smuggler in the Southwest, the president’s team was crafting the rhetoric to sell the crisis they were creating.
On television, in various news outlets, and even in a joint appearance with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Obama pushed the 90 percent lie, implying that 90% of the guns recovered in Mexican cartel violence came from U.S. gun shops.
Issa: I am going to follow a line of questioning I think I have been seeing develop throughout here with law enforcement experts. You have two points, you know the old expression, you connect the dots. The first point is the straw buyer; the last point is the scene of the crime. You’ve said, each of you, Special Agents, that in this case, as soon as you got to the next point of connect the dots, you were generally sent the other direction. You were not allowed to go beyond that next point. You weren’t even allowed to follow that next point, even when they headed north with the weapons.
Now, if an operation like Fast and Furious seems to have a pattern, a consistent pattern, that you’re only looking for two points–the beginning and the end–it’s not a criminal prosecution. It’s not an effective one. Plus, of course, if you take the logic that you can’t prosecute a straw purchaser if the gun is in Mexico, if you take that point, then that part of it was frivolous from the start, even though today, every one of those straw purchasers has been charged, oddly enough, with the evidence that was available before that gun ever walked beyond the first step.
So let me just ask a question for your supposition, but I think it’s a very well educated one. If you only look at the beginning and the end of the dot, isn’t the only thing you’ve proven is that guns in America go to Mexico? Now could that be a political decision? Could that be a decision that basically, we just want to substantiate that guns in America go to Mexico–something we all knew, but would have considerable political impact, as Mexico began complaining about these, and they could say, “Well, yeah–we’re even rolling up the straw purchasers.” It wouldn’t change the fact that Mexicans were dying at the behest of the United States, but wouldn’t it ultimately meet a political goal?
At the same time they were damning gun dealers in public, the administration was secretly forcing them to provide weapons to the cartels, by the armful and without oversight. More than one gun industry insider suggests that the administration extorted cooperation and silence from these gun shops. As the ATF has the power to summarily shut dealers down for the most minor of offenses, that is very, very possible.
This is something I noted previously as well, which starts with a g- and ends with an -overnment regulatory authority.
From the house oversight committee, here is the PDF file of the ATF agents accounts of Fast & Furious. You can read the actual testimony and statements of the ATF agents who participated in this “felony stupid” operation. Except it wasn’t stupid… it was calculated.
More from Pajamas Media (which I suggest reading in its entirety at the link):
As there is a pattern of behavior to suggest that Gunwalker was not a botched law enforcement operation, but was instead an effort by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department to carry out a subversive anti-gun policy of the Obama administration, it is pertinent to examine Obama’s past associations with anti-gun groups.
From 1994-2002, Obama was a director of the Joyce Foundation. Joyce is a progressive organization dedicated to “social justice,” and one of their primary areas of advocacy has always been the funding of gun control organizations. Joyce has long attempted to erode Second Amendment rights, and during Obama’s tenure as a director went so far as to try to subvert Second Amendment scholarship. Joyce gave millions to effectively buy law reviews with grants, and then used those reviews to publish only papers that attacked the individual rights interpretation. The goal was to so pervert legal scholarship that the scholarship would affect Supreme Court decisions.
Joyce director Obama, and those surrounding him, internalized fellow Chicagoan Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. While the Joyce plot narrowly failed, it affirmed Alinsky’s strategy of agitating, fanning hostility, and disorganizing the public in order to force radical change.
We know that Obama’s friends in Joyce Foundation-supported gun control groups suspiciously have not attacked the administration’s gun-running, but instead have attacked the Oversight Committee’s investigation.
The blog that is linked with reference to the Joyce Foundation-supported gun control groups is Snowflakes In Hell, a very reputable, very long-running gun rights blog.
This operation wasn’t just “felony stupid” as Congressman Issa called it. The agents working the field, their supervisors, and even some second-line managers may have been felony stupid and “only following orders”, but that’s not adequate. The program ran for fifteen months, and had supervisors “giddy” when guns were found at murder scenes in Mexico.
That doesn’t add up. Fifteen months worth of work by hundreds of people, by lawyers who drafted up the legal justification for this crime, by agents who participated in it, by supervisors and managers who ran it, and by directors and attorneys general and probably a president who authorized it is not “felony stupid”.
Hanlon’s Razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
1. Tell US FFLs to sell to straw purchasers, let guns go to Mexico, let criminals with guns kill people, including US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and numerous Mexican citizens.
2. ???
3. Bust up drug cartels in another nation.
That doesn’t make any sense. None. Zero. A five year-old can tell that won’t work. Hell, it’s on the Evil Overlord list!
The supervisor of Operation Fast and Furious was “jovial, if not, not giddy but just delighted about” walked guns showing up at crime scenes in Mexico according to an ATF agent. (p. 37)
Another ATF agent told the committee about a prediction he made a year ago that “someone was going to die” and that the gunwalking operation would be the subject of a Congressional investigation. (p. 24)
The shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords created a “state of panic” within the group conducting the operation as they initially feared a “walked” gun might have been used. (p. 38)
One Operation Fast and Furious Agent: “I cannot see anyone who has one iota of concern for human life being okay with this …” (p. 27)
An ATF agent predicted to committee investigators that more deaths will occur as a result of Operation Fast and Furious. (p.39)
Multiple agents told the committee that continued assertions by Department of Justice Officials that guns were not knowingly “walked” and that DOJ tried to stop their transport to Mexico are clearly untruthful. (p. 45-50)
Hanlon’s Razor doesn’t work here. This isn’t stupid. Stupid doesn’t last 15 months and survive the shock of realizing their operation might have killed a congresswoman. This must be intentional. No one could be “giddy” about weapons they facilitated going to a drug cartel being used in murders. No one stupid can want that.
The only thing that makes sense is that the ATF agents, supervisors, managers, US attorneys and attorney general and in all likelihood the president – who’s ultimately responsible for the DOJ – is that this was their intention. Everyone who’s not a whistleblower is a willing accomplice in this mess. I’m sure, much like the anti-gun groups mentioned at Snowflakes in Hell, they thought it was all for The Greater Good.
Consider this, from page 38 of the report:
Q. [S]omebody in management . . . used the terminology “scramble some eggs.”
A. Yes, sir.
Q. If you are going to make an omelette you have got to scramble some eggs. Do you remember the context of that?
A. Yes, sir. It was – there was a prevailing attitude amongst the group and outside of the group in the ATF chain of command, and that was the attitude. . . . I had heard that . . . sentiment from Special Agent [E] Special Agent [L], and Special Agent Voth. And the time referenced in the interview was, I want to say, in May as the GRIT team or gunrunner initiative team was coming out. I was having a conversation with Special Agent [L] about the case in which the conversation ended with me asking her are you prepared to go to a border agent’s funeral over this or a Cochise County deputy’s over this, because that’s going to happen. And the sentiment that was given back to me by both her, the group supervisor, was that . . . if you are going to make an omelette, you need to scramble some eggs.
So what’s the omelette?
That Greater Good of US citizen disarmament, and ultimately US citizen control, is one that the left has been dreaming about for a long time, and Operation Gunwalker just fueled the meme that “guns are bad, m’kay”. It’s also a theme that the international left is a huge fan of. The idea that free independent people should be allowed to arm themselves against tyrants is so repugnant to… well, leftist tyrants… that they’ve even supported genocide in order to further gun control. (Even though the armed community was doing well a few years prior.)
The only thing that makes sense is that this was part of a greater operation to undermine US citizens rights and to achieve disarmament of free people by going “under the radar” and nudging the public into believing that US gun rights need to be curtailed, and government need more power over the citizenry.
A running, functional Jeep. Beat up, needing new tires, but well within the price range and mechanical ability of someone who needs a good vehicle to get to and from work in the winter.
Murdered.
…
There are families out there that need cars. There are mechanics who work on them that need jobs. There are auto parts stores that exist to keep them running. Environmentally, they’re already built, so maintenance work consumes fewer ecological resources than building a toxic-battery death-trap hybrid.
Emotionally (yes, this is very indicative of my age here) this is like watching the Transformers movie as a kid and seeing characters I’d known for years killed. This is like watching Optimus Prime die.
From an objective standpoint, it’s like God is tearing pages from Atlas Shrugged and they’re coming true. When John Galt says he will “Stop the motor of the world,” he means men’s minds… and all Galt does is let idiot moocher/looter/statist/leftist barbarians grind the world to a halt as he steps out of the way.
Now we see those same savages sacraficing the progress of thousands of years in the name of their proven-to-be-lies pagan religion of Global Warming. Even that poor Jeep could take a man on a full tank of gas hundreds of miles down the road in a day – further than any ox-drawn cart ever could. It could save huge amounts of labor that could never be done by hand, it could drive faster than any horse can ride and get a wounded man to help or a pregnant woman to a doctor.
Now, it’s a destroyed hulk…
Nothing but a shrine to the destructiveness of the filthy statist tyrant philosophy of regression and their primitive sky-worshipping religion.
Each one of these vehicles is a masterwork of engineering – of designers, engineers, chemists, physicists, miners, smelters, oilworkers, assemblymen – all of their collective labor being built into a mechanical triumph. The engineer who designs it, the chemists who make the plastic to make the bodies lighter, the physicists who’ve designed the smaller generators, the miners and smelters who make the steel, the oilworkers and chemists who make the plastics, and the assemblymen who put it together. From thousands of miles apart, they’ve worked together to provide a vehicle that transports a man at higher speeds than man has ever seen before – giving mobility and giving freedom to millions! They save lives, they bring lives together… and now…
They’re murdered for some regressive quackery religion that masquerades as truth by consensus of lies and attacks anyone who questions it. They’re murdered by a government that’s become corrupt enough to do quantifiable harm to its own citizens by seizing the money earned by the sweat of their brow and using it to take the very vehicles they seek to own and destroy them. Taxed, destroyed, murdered.
Damn them.
A man on horseback riding all day until exhaustion could maybe manage a hundred miles.
A man in a car can drive a thousand miles in a day in comfort – heat or cool, sitting and resting – and with lights leading his way when the sun goes down. We used to hang horse theives. Now the horse theives tax us to kill our own horses.
ShortTimer
JBH
