Gunwalker Update: ATF Fearlessly Distributing Guns To Criminals

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

A store calling itself Fearless Distributing opened early last year on an out-of-the-way street in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, offering designer clothes, athletic shoes, jewelry and drug paraphernalia.

Those working behind the counter, however, weren’t interested in selling anything.

They were undercover agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives running a storefront sting aimed at busting criminal operations in the city by purchasing drugs and guns from felons.

But the effort to date has not snared any major dealers or taken down a gang. Instead, it resulted in a string of mistakes and failures, including an ATF military-style machine gun landing on the streets of Milwaukee and the agency having $35,000 in merchandise stolen from its store, a Journal Sentinel investigation has found.

The ATF set up a fake distributing company to sell guns and do a “sting”.  Yet somehow, all they managed to do was FUBAR everything.  This should come as no surprise.

When the 10-month operation was shut down after the burglary, agents and Milwaukee police officers who participated in the sting cleared out the store but left behind a sensitive document that listed names, vehicles and phone numbers of undercover agents.

And the agency remains locked in a battle with the building’s owner, who says he is owed about $15,000 because of utility bills, holes in the walls, broken doors and damage from an overflowing toilet.

The sting resulted in charges being filed against about 30 people, most for low-level drug sales and gun possession counts. But agents had the wrong person in at least three cases. In one, they charged a man who was in prison – as a result of an earlier ATF case – at the time agents said he was selling drugs to them.

And it gets even worse:

Residents of the area, tucked between N. Humboldt Blvd. and the Milwaukee River, are angry the ATF secretly drew drug dealers and gun-toting felons to their neighborhood, which is rallying to improve.

The ATF was out there again creating crimes and ruining neighborhoods.

In Milwaukee, agents located Fearless Distributing in a neighborhood where aggravated assaults had been declining since at least 2008, according to an analysis by the Journal Sentinel relying on Milwaukee Police Department numbers.

Aggravated assaults within a mile radius of the storefront dropped to 109 last year from 193 in 2008. Homicides in the area ranged from zero to three per year during the last five years, far fewer than other crime-laden areas in the city.

And then it gets worse from there:

In September, an agent parked his Ford Explorer at the Alterra on N. Humboldt Blvd., about a half mile away, with three ATF guns stored in a metal box in the back.

About 3 p.m. Sept. 13, an Alterra employee spotted three men breaking into the Explorer. They stole three guns: a Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun, a Sig Sauer .40-caliber pistol and an M-4 .223-caliber fully automatic rifle. They also made off with ammunition and an ATF radio, according to a police report.

Yup, the ATF put an actual assault rifle – as in select fire, fully automatic M4 – on the streets, in a neighborhood that was improving until they got there.

One of the suspects hid the machine gun under a bed and took the handguns with him. He was questioned by police and refused to talk. He was released. No one has been charged in the burglary of the ATF guns, according to Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Karen Loebel. She declined to say if charges would be coming.

The ATF soon had one of its stolen guns back, however.

The very next day, according to court documents, 19-year-old Marquise Jones contacted agents at Fearless Distributing and sold the Sig Sauer – and another unrelated handgun – back to agents.

The price: $1,400.

But Jones would not be arrested for two months. And when he was, it was not for the theft. His name does not appear on the police reports related to the vehicle break-in. He was charged with having a stolen gun.

Meanwhile, the hunt for the machine gun and the other stolen handgun continues.

Yup, the ATF’s full-auto M4 is still out there, and they’re paying double price to get their own guns back.  Clearly, though, we need to crack down on US citizens rights.  Only the cops should have guns… and the criminals they give guns to.

Mike Hashimoto at the Dallas Morning News asks “Is it a good idea to give the ATF even more to do?“  Mike, you seem like a very good guy, but check your premise really quick and ask “Is it a good idea to have an ATF at all?“

The ATF has always been an agency full of jack-booted thugs.  Remember the racist ATF “Good Ol’ Boys Roundup” that ran for decades?

This is the same agency that on their good days ruled shoe strings are machineguns and that Chore Boy pads are NFA firearms.  They also throw parties when they get rules passed that infringe on citizens’ rights.

Why not just Boot the ATF entirely?

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Update: Not really an update, more of a post-script, but I figured I’d be remiss if I didn’t note there are a few good ATF agents.  John Dodson, Vince Celafu, and other whistleblowers are good guys.  I’ve met an ATF agent or two who are good people, though they’re usually on the licensing side of the house rather than the legal decision/enforcement side.  The institution itself is set up to tax and control things that aren’t illegal (and two of which are specifically named in the Constitution’s amendments), and that contributes to a corporate culture that is every bit as prone to tyrannical action as a “free speech bureau” that exists to control, regulate, and deny speech would be.

The American Revolution Against British Gun Control

An excellent article by David Kopel.

This Article reviews the British gun control program that precipitated the American Revolution: the 1774 import ban on firearms and gunpowder; the 1774-75 confiscations of firearms and gunpowder; and the use of violence to effectuate the confiscations. It was these events that changed a situation of political tension into a shooting war. Each of these British abuses provides insights into the scope of the modern Second Amendment.

Furious at the December 1773 Boston Tea Party, Parliament in 1774 passed the Coercive Acts. The particular provisions of the Coercive Acts were offensive to Americans, but it was the possibility that the British might deploy the army to enforce them that primed many colonists for armed resistance. The Patriots of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, resolved: “That in the event of Great Britain attempting to force unjust laws upon us by the strength of arms, our cause we leave to heaven and our rifles.” A South Carolina newspaper essay, reprinted in Virginia, urged that any law that had to be enforced by the military was necessarily illegitimate.

The Royal Governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, had forbidden town meetings from taking place more than once a year. When he dispatched the Redcoats to break up an illegal town meeting in Salem, 3000 armed Americans appeared in response, and the British retreated. Gage’s aide John Andrews explained that everyone in the area aged 16 years or older owned a gun and plenty of gunpowder.

Military rule would be difficult to impose on an armed populace. Gage had only 2,000 troops in Boston. There were thousands of armed men in Boston alone, and more in the surrounding area. One response to the problem was to deprive the Americans of gunpowder.

…

Two days after Lord Dartmouth dispatched his disarmament recommendation, King George III and his ministers blocked importation of arms and ammunition to America. Read literally, the order merely required a permit to export arms or ammunition from Great Britain to America. In practice, no permits were granted.

Similar to the threats of ammunition taxes, restrictions, shipping bans, etc., that are going on today.  Same gun control plans, same tyrannical objectives.

The British government was not, in a purely formal sense, attempting to abolish the Americans’ common law right of self-defense. Yet in practice, that was precisely what the British were attempting. First, by disarming the Americans, the British were attempting to make the practical exercise of the right of personal self-defense much more difficult. Second, and more fundamentally, the Americans made no distinction between self-defense against a lone criminal or against a criminal government. To the Americans, and to their British Whig ancestors, the right of self-defense necessarily implied the right of armed self-defense against tyranny.

…

At Lexington and Concord, forcible disarmament had not worked out for the British. So back in Boston, Gage set out to disarm the Bostonians a different way.

On April 23, 1775, Gage offered the Bostonians the opportunity to leave town if they surrendered their arms. The Boston Selectmen voted to accept the offer, and within days, 2,674 guns were deposited, one gun for every two adult male Bostonians.

Gage thought that many Bostonians still had guns, and he refused to allow the Bostonians to leave.

Someone disarming you who doesn’t honor their word?  Naw, never happened before!

Contrast Massachusetts as a defender of liberty in the 1700s in the whole article (which I recommend reading) with anti-rights, pro-control Massachusetts of today.

To the Americans of the Revolution and the Founding Era, the theory of some late-20th Century courts that the Second Amendment is a “collective right” and not an “individual right” might have seemed incomprehensible. The Americans owned guns individually, in their homes. They owned guns collectively, in their town armories and powder houses. They would not allow the British to confiscate their individual arms, nor their collective arms; and when the British tried to do both, the Revolution began. The Americans used their individual arms and their collective arms to fight against the confiscation of any arms. Americans fought to provide themselves a government that would never perpetrate the abuses that had provoked the Revolution.

On Banning Of Online Ammo Sales

A few other points are missed here.  If you buy online, you not only have to provide your credit card info that matches your mailing address, but most, if not all, online stores also require a state-issued form of ID.

This is actually more than 1000 rounds of ammo.  It’s 1100 rounds (measured by weight, so give or take), with Lego Indiana Jones, a horse, and shag carpeting for size comparison (and I have the Legos as far back from the front of the box so with camera tricks it looks as “big” as possible…until you remember how little a Lego is or look down at the carpet):

And people want to make that “an arsenal”?

Why need 1100 rounds?  Buying in bulk, like the video mentioned, saves money.  If I were to buy 11 boxes of 50 rounds, I’d be paying a lot more for packaging and individual costs, retailer markup due to the retailer having to deal with 11 pieces of inventory instead of 1, and so on.  Why need 1100 rounds?  If you go plinking for a day with a .22, you can easily burn through all that ammo in an afternoon.

Why need 1100 rounds of centerfire ammo?  Same reason.

I’ve mentioned much of this before, but I’ll also address something else the video said about there being no tracking on ammo at stores.  To the leftist, this doesn’t mean “oh, online ammo is okay”, it means “store sold ammo is evil”.  They want that banned, too.

Criminals will always violate the law.  Criminals will always find people with clean records (straw purchasers) to make gun or ammo buys for them.  The ATF and FBI have even enabled illegal straw purchases of guns and ammunition in order to support Mexican narcoterrorist cartels so the ATF could blame American gun owners for Mexican crime.

Tracking gun and ammo sales, imposing high taxes, cutting off ammo supplies to rural areas by banning ammo sales – all of these are tools to deny people their rights.  Imagine that if, in order to buy a computer or a printer, your purchase was tracked, higher taxes were imposed, and buying a computer online was made illegal.  This would make buying a computer and printer and being able to exercise your First Amendment rights that much harder to do.  In regular old economics, we’re talking about the government establishing a barrier to entry for you as a citizen in order to stop you from exercising your rights.

All it really does is make it harder for the person of limited means to afford to exercise their Second Amendment rights.  It makes them more dependent on government, rather than less.  It hurts folks in rural areas a lot, as they’re cut off or subjected to gouging local monopolies.  It stymies American gun culture through regulation – which is the leftist/progressive point, all of which enables tyranny – at the individual level oppressed by criminals or madmen, and at the national level oppressed by government and madmen.

David Gregory’s Magazinegate – The ATF Weighs In… Sort Of

From Yahoo News:

Gwendolyn Crump, director of the Office of Communications for the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, told ABC News, “NBC contacted MPD inquiring if they could utilize a high capacity magazine for their segment. NBC was informed that possession of a high capacity magazine is not permissible and their request was denied. This matter is currently being investigated.”

But ABC News has learned from an official at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives that NBC had reached out to the federal agency on Friday for advice before displaying the weaponry.

According to the ATF official, the agency noted that ATF doesn’t enforce D.C. gun laws, but agreed to put the question to a couple of Washington police officers who’ve worked with the agency in the past.

The D.C. officers advised the ATF spokesman that Gregory could display the magazine, provided it was empty, the source said.

This is one of those times when it’s useful to note that cops aren’t lawyers.  Police have a bevy of regulations, rules, laws and ordinances to enforce, and have to have a breadth of knowledge across the whole of their enforceable jurisdiction that often results in thin spots at the periphery.  In short, the cops don’t always know every law.   Here, the DC police who responded to NBC from the department and said no were correct.  Those DC officers who responded to the ATF’s query were incorrect.  The statute is quite clear:

(b) No person in the District shall possess, sell, or transfer any large capacity ammunition feeding device regardless of whether the device is attached to a firearm. For the purposes of this subsection, the term “large capacity ammunition feeding device” means a magazine, belt, drum, feed strip, or similar device that has a capacity of, or that can be readily restored or converted to accept, more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The term “large capacity ammunition feeding device” shall not include an attached tubular device designed to accept, and capable of operating only with, .22 caliber rimfire ammunition.

H/T Durka Durka

And as ATF noted, they don’t enforce DC gun laws.  They don’t have to be aware of them all.

That turned out to be bad advice, as conservative media and gun rights activists were first to note. The ATF official describes this as a “misunderstanding,” and says he hopes DC police will not bring charges.

“Misunderstandings” for the little guy mean they get chained to a bed for months.

Maybe the ATF has learned from the murders of Brian Terry, Jaime Zapata, and now Susana Flores Maria Gamez, that they really should lie low for a while.  Any discussion about gun control that involves the ATF will end up bringing up the ATF’s smuggling of thousands of weapons to Mexico’s narcoterrorist cartels, which isn’t going to help those wanting to eliminate citizens’ rights really make any points other than that government force can’t be trusted.  And of course, there’s still the ongoing investigation and lawsuits to push for disclosure of some 70,000 documents that the ATF and DOJ have been stonewalling on since they started abetting murdering Mexicans and federal agents.

This is another one of those things that happens when you deal with too many regulations and too many agencies.  What is legal according to one can be illegal according to another.  Businesses that deal with city, county, state, and federal rules on commerce run into this all the time.  Firearms owners in states without preemption laws at some level often have to deal with patchwork laws as well, and have to be very aware of the minefield they constantly weave.

Today’s Gun Control News Roundup

To start off, the First Amendment is under attack as well as the Second.  From Bunch Blog:

All of these video games, do they really need to be so violent? is the question that will come next. Studies show that video games lead to murder! ideologues will shout. Why are we teaching our kids to kill? Don’t believe me?

My point? Just this: Gamers should be extremely, extremely wary about the liberal impulse to “do something” in the wake of a tragedy. Guns aren’t going anywhere. Video games about war marketed to easily impressed teens and young adults (the demographic that tends to commit mass murder)? Well, they’re slightly less secure.

Keep in mind the people who wanted to ban music the most in the 1990s were Democrats led by Tipper Gore; and those who went after video games included then-Democrat Joe Lieberman (now an independent due to totally unrelated factors).

Quentin Tarantino’s new movie Django Unchained, which is a dose of the old ultra-violence, struck me as strange over the weekend.  Listening to CNN and FOX on XM radio, almost every commercial break from the Connecticut mass murder was an ad for a movie… about mass murder.  Is it justified in context of the film?  Haven’t seen it.  But it brings up some questions, which Tarantino has addressed by having the premier cancelled, but otherwise just saying:

Speaking in New York Quentin Tarantino said: “I just think you know there’s violence in the world, tragedies happen, blame the playmakers. It’s a western. Give me a break.”

The Oscar-nominated director of Inglourious Basterds and the Palme d’Or winning Pulp Fiction, said blame for violence should remain squarely with the perpetrators.

The only people responsible for crimes and violence are those who commit them.  Millions of people every day who are also immersed in popular culture don’t go out and commit murders.

Reason Magazine has a couple of good pieces today on how gun control doesn’t work – the first about how mass shootings aren’t really on the uptick:

those who study mass shootings say they are not becoming more common.

“There is no pattern, there is no increase,” says criminologist James Allen Fox of Boston’s Northeastern University, who has been studying the subject since the 1980s, spurred by a rash of mass shootings in post offices.

The random mass shootings that get the most media attention are the rarest, Fox says. Most people who die of bullet wounds knew the identity of their killer….

Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data. He estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first decade of the century.

Another Reason piece highlights the Magical Thinking of Gun Controllers, summed up easily in their last sentence:

The notion that restrictions like these can have a noticeable impact, let alone that they can “end” or “stop” occasional outbursts of senseless violence, is hard to credit unless you believe what Obama insists he does not: that evil can be legislated out of the world by acts of Congress.

And finally, from the Atlantic, a piece that notes that we’ve already had the debate on gun control.  And gun control lost to gun rights:

There isn’t anything wrong with gun-control advocates lamenting what, by their lights, is a public that’s reaching wrongheaded conclusions on the subject and is trending in the wrong direction.

But too many pieces I’ve read make a mockery of robust debate in a pluralistic society by ignoring the fact that current policy is largely (though not entirely) a reflection of the U.S. public disagreeing with gun reformers. The average American is far more likely than the average journalist or academic to identify with gun culture, to insist that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to bear arms, to exercise that right, and to support various state concealed-carry laws.

…

Opponents of gun control have been widely vilified in the past week. Very few attempts have been made to understand what motivates them — and given that they’re a subset of Americans with little representation in the national media, attempts at understanding would likely do a lot to inform the rest of the American public. For the most part, these people aren’t in fact motivated by selfishness, as so many critics have stated or implied in the last few days, and almost without exception, gun-control opponents are as horrified by the events in Newtown as anyone calling for a new assault-weapons ban or better background checks or a ban on ammunition.

The point isn’t whether they’re being treated fairly or not. It’s that a gun debate can only be productive in a country as pro-gun as this one when the folks on either side at least understand the deeply held disagreements at issue. So far, too many newly vocal reformers are operating under the conceit that if only America “finally” had a conversation about gun violence, everyone would immediately see the wisdom of the position reformers have advocated all along.

It’s an interesting piece in that it recognizes that journolists and reporters are widely in opposition to the actual citizenry.  It’s somewhat screwed up in that it assumes there’s a debate to have between the wrong (gun grabbers who ultimately support tyranny, whether knowing or unknowing) and right (citizens’ rights advocates).  There are a few restrictions (violent felons, mentally ill, etc.) that are important, but beyond those very, rare few who are incapable of being responsible citizens, shall not be infringed means what it says.

Many people need to understand how rights work:

A HUMAN RIGHT.

Obama to Bypass Congress for Ban on Semi-Autos?

From Expertclick, that idea is floated by John Snyder:

“According to confidential information,” he continued, “forces linked with the administration suggest the government classify semiautomatic firearms and multiple capacity ammunition feeding devices as Title 2 National Firearms Act items under the Gun Control Act of 1968.

“Under this scenario, semiautomatics and high capacity magazines could be acquired only with great difficulty and at great expense by America’s estimated 100 million law-abiding firearms owners.”

“The Obama gang probably realizes it would have a possibly insurmountable difficulty getting a semi auto ban, such as that considered by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and others, through Congress,” Snyder noted.  “Congressional Second Amendment supporters already are preparing for such a battle. During the Clinton years, Congress enacted a partial, temporary semiauto ban but allowed it to sunset after 10 years because of its lack of significant negative impact on crime.  The Obama administration now may order the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to take the classification step.  Some gun-grabbers view the designation of Street Sweeper shotguns as Title 2 firearms during the Clinton administration as precedent for such a move.

It’s a very interesting theory, and not entirely without merit.

We’ve already seen OSHA try to regulate ammo and gun shops into non-existence, we’ve seen the EPA attempts to ban lead ammo as well as other types, which would make shooting sports prohibitively expensive, the new reporting requirements along the border that were created because of Obama and Holder’s ATF’s murderous Fast and Furious program.

What’s stopping them?  Eh, not really that much.  Congress doesn’t seem to have the stomach to deal with much in the way of executive regulation.

All it takes is a regulatory classification change and suddenly the Glock 17 on your nightstand is an evil assault weapon that you have to pay a $200 tax stamp to own and go through all the titling hassles and dealing with your chief local law enforcement officer (who can refuse your “right” that’s turned into a priviledge).

Also, there are plenty of regulatory changes that can be had to screw with the industry – namely import restrictions.  Consider what happened with Saiga-12 shotguns.  They’re sporting guns heavily favored by 3-gun shooters, and just as suited to any other application you’d use a shotgun for, but they happen to look scary and evil.  Because they have magazines and can take modern grips.  And they’re black (because gun-banners are racist, really they are, that’s only halfway a joke).

Watch out, it can turn more evil before your eyes!

Though it does almost exactly the same thing as any other semi-auto shotgun, like the Browning Auto 5, for example:

One looks evil, one looks delightfully bucolic.

The ATF could arbitrarily change classifications for the Saiga and thus stop their importation.  No more Saigas.  Just like that, with the change of a regulation.

Similarly, changing of regulations could make semi autos, both the scary, evil, demonic devil-worshipping Saiga above and the wholesome loves mom and loves apple pie, grouse hunting Browning Auto-5 into a different legal title of firearm requiring a $200 tax stamp, licensing from local law enforcement, and a host of other obnoxious regulations.

Not only is this a big deal, but it’s a big deal for the future of citizens’ rights.

Consider that the DC v Heller left the Second Amendment an individual right, but still subject to restrictions.  That the Supreme Court is not allowed to interpret the Constitution, but simply measure new laws against the Constitution and uphold them or turn them down is a whole other issue, but I digress.  Consider this:

(f) None of the Court’s precedents forecloses the Court’s interpretation. Neither United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542 , nor Presser v. Illinois, 116 U. S. 252 , refutes the individual-rights interpretation. United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174 , does not limit the right to keep and bear arms to militia purposes, but rather limits the type of weapon to which the right applies to those used by the militia, i.e., those in common use for lawful purposes. Pp. 47–54.

Common use by the time of Miller (1939), the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) had already been in place for 5 years.  The NFA instituted the $200 tax stamp on certain classes of firearms, and banned many others, or subjected them to onerous restrictions.  $200 in 1934 is $3452 in 2012.  That $200 tax stamp meant that some categories of firearms, like full-autos, would never become popular, and would never be in common use… even if they did have their utility, and were even advertised for it:

But with one law that banned one class of firearm, they suddenly could never be “common”, and within a short period of time, only those “commonly allowed” would be permitted… as in the remainder that weren’t already banned.  Hardly “shall not be infringed”.

To give one example from Miller, the “short-barreled shotgun” was considered not useful for any purpose, whether militia or sporting or anything else.  Yet the IRS needs 14-inch barreled shotguns that you and I need special permission to own.  Even US Border Patrol, which is arguably the closest thing to a paramilitary force the US has, carries 14″ shotguns and 14.5″ rifles, both of which require special paperwork for John Q. Public to own (shotgun info here).

All it takes is regulations to circumvent the law and the Constitution.

EPA’s Human Testing in North Carolina

H/T Quinn & Rose, via NBC 17 Chapel Hill:

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. –

A Virginia-based public policy foundation claims that the EPA knowingly piped diesel exhaust into the lungs of dozens of people at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The American Tradition Institute Environmental Law Center is suing the Environmental Protection Agency for on-going experiments at the EPA’s Human Studies facility at UNC-Chapel Hill. The lawsuit alleges an EPA trial took diesel exhaust and piped it into the lungs of 41 people to see what would happen.

The institute says the EPA has exposed unhealthy patients to high levels of PM2.5, a toxic substance found in diesel exhaust, in experiments that began roughly six years ago.

PM 2.5 is “Particulate matter, 2.5 microns”.  It’s what Lisa Jackson Lee, head of Obama’s EPA, declared harmful to humans and the province of the EPA to regulate, in order to amass more power and destroy more US industries through regulation.  Note the story says that the suit goes all the way back to 2006, so who knows how long the EPA has been doing this kind of stuff.

From NBC 17′s site (in case it goes away):

EPA Human Testing has all kinds of backstory on it.

There are some tin foil red flags in the video, but there’s clearly something odd going on there.

With the Benghazi lies and Fast and Furious (and even Wide Receiver), it’s not much to put something like this past the EPA.

What’s Missing in the Microstamping Debate – It’s a Scam by Patent Owner Todd Lizotte

HotAir has this piece today on what’s been an ongoing fight for years now with regards to backdoor gun laws.

One story out this month hits pretty close to home for me, both figuratively and literally. It involves the Remington Arms plant located in Ilion, a village in upstate New York. They are currently battling a pending move by the state government which would force them to put laser etched microstamps on the firing pins of all their weapons, driving costs through the roof.

From the FOX story that they link to:

Two venerable American gun manufacturers — Remington and Colt — could head for the West their weapons helped win if New York and Connecticut force them to implement microstamping technology.

Microstamping, or ballistic imprinting, is a patented process that uses laser technology to engrave a tiny marking of the make, model and serial number on the tip of a gun’s firing pin to allow an imprint of that information on spent cartridge cases. Supporters of the technology say it will be a “game changer,” allowing authorities to quickly identify the registered guns used in crimes. Opponents claim the process is costly, unreliable and may ultimately impact the local economies that heavily depend on the gun industry, including Ilion, N.Y., where Remington Arms maintains a factory, and Hartford, Conn., where Colt’s manufacturing is headquartered.

I’ve put the key words in bold.

HotAir and the FOX story both list a myriad of reasons why microstamping fails, from the fact that firing pins can be swapped, to the fact that it won’t make a difference on guns that don’t leave brass, to the fact any brass left at a firing range can then be used to incriminate non-criminals (the same way Ted Kaczynski famously went to barber shops to gather random hairs to put in his letters), it’s so flawed it’s almost laughable among those who understand firearms, but the most important fact is that it’s a patented process.

There’s one guy – Todd Lizotte – who stands to benefit millions upon millions upon millions if he can get the government to force firearms manufacturers to mandate his process.  He’s got all the anti-rights activists behind him that want citizens rendered defenseless and gun companies destroyed, and he’s got his own desire to line his pockets with millions and millions in loot.

Even though the Lizotte reportedly says he wants his patent to expire and the technology to enter the public domain, he stands to reap the significant rewards as a consultant to those many firearms manufacturers that would be faced with the challenge of optimizing the microstamping process.

Optimization would not be a one-time procedure, but rather would be required each a time a company retooled because of wear and tear on parts and machinery. Legislation that would mandate and reward the use of sole-sourced, patented technology should also be closely scrutinized, and microstamping does not hold up to that scrutiny.

The Times’ article quoted divergent estimates of how microstamping would affect the retail price of firearms, with industry estimating costs would increase by $200 per firearm and microstamping advocates putting the cost at $12 per gun.

He won’t let the patent expire.  He’ll make millions upon millions on a process that does not and cannot work, but that government will force the industry to adopt.

AFTE here is the Association of Firearms and Toolmark Examiners, a professional journal.

Surely, the manufacturers are in a better position to estimate their costs of implementing this process, which would  require assembling firearms with a unique set of parts rather than in a batch process of interchangeable parts, as the AFTE paper points out.

Even if microstamping were adopted in New York and worked as claimed, it would not be the crime-solving solution its proponents suggest. Most guns used in crime are stolen. Many guns used to commit crimes in New York State were originally sold at retail outside the state. In New York firearms recovered by law enforcement were originally lawfully sold on average almost 14 years before being recovered by the police.

As result, even if microstamping were adopted in New York, shell casings recovered at crime scenes would be very unlikely to have microstamping marks.  And it would be about 14 years before casings start showing up at crime scenes in New York with markings that would be largely illegible.

Implementing microstamping is also not without cost to the taxpayer.  In order to examine the illegible micro laser engraved markings on cartridge casings New York State crime labs would be need to purchase special scanning electronic microscopes which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

His own defense of microstamping makes no sense, and bears the kind of fundamental lack of understanding of guns, crime, law, the Constitution, and overall makes as much sense as a desperate man drooling over millions and millions of dollars can make… that is to say, he can’t even make his own sentences work.  “I am bias.” – Todd Lizotte.  Yes, yes you are.

Update 5/19/2013: Noted in the comments by Mr. Frey, it looks like Lizotte may have let the patent expire.

ATF’s Strategies

From GunMag:

You sometimes meet the most interesting people at the gun range. Recently, I initiated a conversation with a fellow who turned out to be a retired ATF agent. Naturally, I brought up the subject of the foul operation known as Fast and Furious. To my surprise, this fellow stated that an operation such as Fast and Furious is just one part of a 3-part ongoing procedure. Fast and Furious, according to this retired ATF agent, was developed to discredit firearms dealers. If guns purchased in the US “walked” across the southern border and wound up in the hands of drug cartel members, then ATF would have cause to put even more restraints on firearms retailers while at the same time giving the ignorant public a poisoned view of gun shops and gunsmiths.

Second part of ATF’s discrediting procedure is to put an undue strain on manufacturers and importers and in some cases, actually put them out of business. The way they perform this neat little trick is by coming up with rules and regulations that are completely arbitrary.

Third part in the procedure is to “examine” and “test” firearms to make sure they comply with the Gun Control Act of 68, the National Firearms Act and whatever other federal law may apply. This is aimed at the individual gun owner, who is then arrested and prosecuted based on what comes out of the ATF lab.

Project Gunrunner was an operation during the Bush administration to track guns from the US into Mexico. Tabs were kept on the guns and the operation was kept under close scrutiny. As soon as the Obama administration hit the White House and let it be known it was hostile to the Second Amendment, ATF developed Fast and Furious, to pump guns out of Phoenix into Mexico, and Wide Receiver, to do the same out of Tucson. During Obama’s first year in office, a figure was thrown out to the press to discredit gun dealers. It was said that over 90% of the firearms ending up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels came from sales in US gun shops. This figure was obviously false, but in order to bolster it and make it come true, ATF forged ahead with Fast and Furious and Wide Receiver. The bureau figured that pushing guns across the border into cartel hands would do irrevocable harm to US firearms retailers and give the bureau an excuse to develop even more Draconian anti-gun regulations. This would especially be true with a sympathetic anti-gun administration. It may have worked if not for the deaths of Customs Special Agent Jaime Zapata and Border Patrol Brian Agent Terry at the hands of ATF’s untraced weapons. As it turned out, ATF’s inability to track weapons they coerced firearms dealers to sell led to not only the deaths of two American law enforcement individuals, but hundreds of Mexican citizens as well.

It’s a long piece, but well worth reading.  You can click the ATF tag below the blog post title here and find many of the things mentioned in the story covered here.  Much of it is easy to corroborate, and many of the little notes are only a google search away if they seem outlandish.

For example, the ATF’s shoestring machine gun letter.

If the “retired ATF guy spills the beans” seems implausible, think about how anyone who retires from a crappy job talks about it.  They may shut up when they work with the company, but as soon as they’re out, they’ve got no more job to protect, no more concerns about “what if the boss hears”.  Beyond just high-visibility whistleblowers like Dodson, there are some good people at the ATF, who either want to keep guns out of the hands of actual bad guys, or who want to make the licensing procedure run smooth so citizens can get through the red tape that does infringe on their 2A rights.

And if it seems sinister (beyond the nightmare conspiracy that really is Fast and Furious, that is), remember this is an agency that was getting “Always Think Forfeiture” put on their Leatherman multitools.  And the agency that throws parties when they impose restrictions and regulations on citizens.

ATF’s Latest Gun Grab: “Always Think Forfeiture”

I noted some of this story in the last post, but it deserves one of its own.  Via Washington Times:

The Obama administration is making it easier for bureaucrats to take away guns without offering the accused any realistic due process. In a final rule published last week, the Justice Department granted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) authority to “seize and administratively forfeit property involved in controlled-substance abuses.” That means government can grab firearms and other property from someone who has never been convicted or even charged with any crime.

It’s a dangerous extension of the civil-forfeiture doctrine, a surreal legal fiction in which the seized property — not a person — is put on trial. This allows prosecutors to dispense with pesky constitutional rights, which conveniently don’t apply to inanimate objects. In this looking-glass world, the owner is effectively guilty until proved innocent and has the burden of proving otherwise. Anyone falsely accused will never see his property again unless he succeeds in an expensive uphill legal battle.

Such seizures are common in drug cases, which sometimes can ensnare people who have done nothing wrong. James Lieto found out about civil forfeiture the hard way when the FBI seized $392,000 from his business because the money was being carried by an armored-car firm he had hired that had fallen under a federal investigation. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Mr. Lieto was never accused of any crime, yet he spent thousands in legal fees to get his money back.

ATF is all about taking your stuff and never giving it back, no matter if you’re guilty or not.  They even got it put on their Leatherman multitools for a while.

The rule extending civil-forfeiture power to the ATF recognizes this dynamic, stating with perhaps unconscious cynicism that an uncontested civil forfeiture “can be perfected for minimal cost” compared to the “hundreds or thousands of dollars” and “years” needed for judicial forfeiture. Nowhere is there any recognition of the burden placed on innocent citizens stripped of their property, or of the erosion of their civil liberties. In fact, the rule argues that, because in the past the ATF could turn over requests for civil forfeiture to the Drug Enforcement Administration, there has been no change in “individual rights.”

This is where your rights are lost – somewhere deep in a regulatory bureaucratic labyrinth where up is down and wrong is right.  Your property can be seized, uncontested, you get no appeal to a judge, and yet there has been no change in “individual rights”.

Instead of expanding the profit motive in policing, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. should be working to eliminate it.