Sunday, March 23, 2014

Dave Workman: Should ATF be Altered or Abolished?

Sen. Feinstein wants President Obama to “ensure that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) fully enforces the ban on the importation of these military-style firearms.”

It’s been a bad week for the ATF leading up to yesterday’s publicity about a new subpoena issued by the House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. Darrell Issa, and now Feinstein wants to drag the agency even deeper into the mire. All of this once again raises a question that has been discussed and debated for several years: Should the role of ATF be significantly altered – say to nothing more than a regulatory operation – or should the agency, with a reputation for somewhat “rogue” behavior, be abolished altogether?

It’s a fair question, considering the re-erupting scandal over ATF “storefront sting” operations in six cities called “Operation Fearless.” As this column reported yesterday, Congressman Issa says the agency has been stonewalling for a year on his inquiries about the operation that was exposed by a series of stories in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Last weekend’s raid on California’s Ares Armor has become something of an internet sensation, with video posted on YouTube, and CEO Dimitrios Karras actively pleading his case to the court of public opinion.

People still have questions about the ATF’s horribly mismanaged Operation Fast and Furious, which allowed a couple of thousand guns to travel into the criminal pipeline to Mexico, and was the source of a gun linked directly to the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in December 2010.

More Here at Seattle Gun Rights Examiner

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The ATF absolutely needs to be abolished. Completely destroyed. Eliminated in its entirety. It does nothing but turn law-abiding citizens into criminals for its own amusement.

Any good that the ATF does is more than negated by the innocent people it turns into criminals.