Comments on: ATF and Clerical Errors

By: Heartless Libertarian

Heartless Libertarian — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 04:34:16 +0000

No, if they don’t have the gun, and the 4473 is MIA, then the gun is “lost,” even if it was sold 35 years ago. If the bound book and the 4473 don’t agree, the gun is, again, “lost.”

By: wrangler5

wrangler5 — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 05:57:48 +0000

It’s my understanding that the ATF takes the position (without any statutory authority to do so) that if you ever completed an item on a form correctly, then EACH and EVERY subsequent failure to complete it correctly is a “willful” violation. Because you know how to do it correctly, you see, but didn’t. There is no such thing as a “mistake”, “oversight” or “error” in this regime.

I’m not aware of any other area of the law where this sort of approach is applied.

That said, the article doesn’t suggest that the store just made one paperwork error a week, but that they “lost” a gun a week. I don’t care how big an operation you have, a gun a week disappearing sounds to me like a BIG deal. OTOH, it may just be that the guns are still all somewhere on premises, they just aren’t accounted for properly in the logbooks. That, of course, is a much smaller deal, but naturally the ATF would be unable to make the distinction.

More facts would be nice.

By: joated

joated — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 01:05:19 +0000

Just how long is a dealer supposed to keep his records anyway? 40 years seems like an awfully long time. And why are they keeping these records so long anyway?

By: Captain Holly

Captain Holly — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 22:57:06 +0000

Reading the article, it looks as if this was a bureaucratic hit job — DiFi herself called them “illegal gun traffickers”. It’s not surprising that some local ATF bigwig would take the bait in order to curry favor with CA’s senior senator.

By: markm

markm — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 19:36:25 +0000

Just what I was thinking – the numerator is meaningless without the denominator.

By: Heartless Libertarian

Heartless Libertarian — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 16:41:51 +0000

2,000 guns sounds like a big number, but 2,000 over almost 40 years? They describe the store as “one of the biggest in Northern California.” San Leandro is in the SF Bay Area, so if they’re described as big, they probably move some very serious volume. And 40 years worth…

You’re looking a, on average, one messed up record every week or so. Be interesting to see if the number of ‘unaccounted for’ guns increases as the records get older. Stuff gets lost after a couple of decades. It just happens.