Common Folk Using Common Sense

From the Times Union:

The Albany Police Officers Union wants to keep secret the names of any officers who illicitly purchased machine guns through the department years ago.

The scandal was first exposed in an Aug. 26 Times Union story which reported that dozens of officers, as well as an assistant chief and at least one Albany County prosecutor, had used the department to illegally buy the federally regulated guns at tax-exempt, discount prices. They claimed the guns were for “official duties only” and subsequently registered them to the department, records obtained by the Times Union show.

In the wake of that report, Chief James W. Tuffey said the fully automatic guns were never deployed on the street and that many of the officers who got them were simply gun enthusiasts who used the department to illicitly obtain the automatic weapons.

The U.S. attorney’s office declined to take action on the Albany gun purchases. Federal prosecutors in Albany were briefed about the matter four years ago by the ATF, sources in the investigation said.

Huh? The ATF knew about this illegal machine gun scheme four years ago and they decided to do nothing about it?

Now contrast this with this from World Net Daily:

The government is using paperwork errors as small as the abbreviation of a city name to shut down some of the nation’s longest-serving gun shops, and 2nd Amendment advocates fear the right to bear arms will mean little if there’s no way to obtain a gun.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Larry Pratt, of Gun Owners of America, told WND while confirming that as recently as 15 or 20 years ago, there were 250,000 licensed gun dealers in the United States.

Today, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told WND, there are 108,381, and if more cases involving dealers such as Red’s Trading Post of Twin Falls, Idaho, develop, that number will plummet quickly.

The BATFE has also been putting dealers around the country out of business based on paperwork errors that are not spelled out by any written procedures. They put one dealer out of business because he had over 60 “willful violations” where his customers had abbreviated “Baltimore” (City or County) with “Blto”. When I purchased my last handgun the dealer was adamant that I not abbreviate anything, including words like “road” or “county” lest the dealer get shut down for “gross” errors.

The BATFE revoked Red’s Trading Post’s right to buy and trade guns again after finding the gun shop had committed errors in its gun sales. But U.S. District Judge Edward J. Lodge ruled that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had exaggerated and omitted some of its findings used to justify revoking Red’s license. Exaggerated and omitted? Are these folks out of control?

So if the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives knows about illegal machine gun purchases and does nothing, but goes completely ape because an otherwise law-abiding citizen writes “Ave” instead of “Avenue” on his gun application …

… then what good does the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives do for this country?

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (abbreviated ATF, sometimes BATF or BATFE) is a United States federal agency; more specifically a specialized law enforcement and regulatory organization within the United States Department of Justice. Its responsibilities include the investigation and prevention of federal offenses involving the unlawful use, manufacture, and possession of firearms and explosives, acts of arson and bombings, and illegal trafficking of alcohol and tobacco products. But they have evolved to an organization that seeks to remove guns from law-abiding citizens, the “great unwashed”, leaving only the government with access to firearms.

Jim McNally, the Field Office Spokesman for the Boston office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE), was quoted in the Sentinel and Enterprise Newspaper as saying, “Someone buys a gun legally, and they’re a walking timebomb. It’s almost impossible to ask law enforcement to determine when somebody is going to cross that line.” With that you can see that, according to the BATFE, anyone that legally purchases a firearm is a criminal-in-waiting. This kind of language is uncalled for from an agency that is committed to strong relationships with the industry and its user base to ensure the nation’s laws are followed. They’re actually attacking the very people they’re sworn to protect.

Reminds me of the mindless hulks at the IRS. It should – the agency started out as the Alcohol Tax Unit of the IRS.

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) has introduced H.R. 1791 to bring some overdue accountability to the BATFE. His bill would require the videotaping of the testing of all “crime” guns involved in BATFE cases to see if the guns were really “evil”.

“If it wasn’t for criminals, there wouldn’t be a gun industry in this country,” said Gerard Nunziato, a former BATFE official. I disagree, sir, for I own handguns, rifles, and shotguns, and I am no criminal. There are a few gun manufacturers that have made a tiny profit on my purchases, all legal and within the bounds of all laws. So how can you infer that the gun industry is only propped up by criminals? I don’t remember any recent news article informing me how a criminal first dropped by the local gun store to purchase the gun they would later use in a crime.

So is the BATFE a protector of the people, or a menace to the Second Amendment?

machine gun, automatic gun, automatic weapon, Larry Pratt, Gun Owners of America, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Red’s Trading Post, BATFE

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