ATF gets its own puff piece
Mother Jones laments that the poor, put upon ATF lacks personnel and is underfunded. From the piece:
“We always crack up when they’re like, ‘You’re coming to take our guns,'” says Corey Ray with an eye roll. “Look, we don’t have the people.” Ray, an ATF spokesman, reels off some facts: More than 10 million guns are made in the United States every year, and another 5 million are imported. That’s on top of the estimated 350 million already in Americans’ hands. Then consider that there are only 2,600 ATF special agents, and it’s not hard to see why gun grabbing isn’t just a political fantasy, but a mathematical impossibility. “Even if we were like, ‘Yeah, we’re coming to take your guns,'” Ray says, “30 years from now you might get a knock on your door.”
The ATF has a hard enough time doing the job it’s actually set up to do. By design, it’s an analog agency in a digital world. The bureau currently gets 2 million new records a month, documents that line the hallways and are stacked head-high in offices throughout the tracing center. The overflow extends to the parking lot, where on the day I visited there were 13 shipping containers crammed with paperwork. Much of it comes from gun dealers that have gone out of business and are required to send their sales records to the ATF. They come in on microfilm, on DVDs, in encrypted files. Some arrive burned, soaked, or on tracing paper. “It makes you wonder if this was done on purpose,” says Ray, pointing to a pile of partly shredded documents
Well, good. They seem to think they won’t be able to disarm people. Cut their funding even more.
September 27th, 2016 at 6:24 pm
Odd that they have time to smuggle guns to f’ing Mexican drug cartels, given that shortage of manpower.
September 27th, 2016 at 6:50 pm
Yeah, there’s no way they’d be able to pull in US Marshals or local cops and deputy sheriffs (although there might be a few Sheriffs out here in the west that would look askance at the BATFE coming in to confiscate guns) for the manpower to pull it off.
And if the feds were really serious I’m sure posse comititus wouldn’t make them pause for a nanosecond.
September 27th, 2016 at 7:00 pm
RCCJr beat me to it; anything the ATF can’t do themselves will be subcontracted out.
September 28th, 2016 at 8:10 am
“We can’t come for your guns, we don’t have the people.” is just the flip side of “When we get the people we’re coming for your guns.”. Same coin. Same metal.
September 28th, 2016 at 9:50 am
Odd how the ATF can trace guns from major crime scenes that make national news, through all their sales back to the manufacturer, within an amazingly short time of the event, such as the San Bernadino jihadists. Searching through paper files at gun dealers for info on the shooter’s purchases, it seems, would take a lot longer. It’s almost like there is a computerized firearm registration that ATF uses, that they haven’t told anyone about. Just good work on their part, again and again and again, I suppose. Kudos for that!
September 28th, 2016 at 11:52 am
Remember when Mother Jones was against cops and “the man”?
And didn’t write puff pieces lauding federal police?
September 28th, 2016 at 2:12 pm
“Odd how the ATF can trace guns from major crime scenes that make national news, through all their sales back to the manufacturer, within an amazingly short time of the event, such as the San Bernadino jihadists.”
Thats not how its done, Mikee, and there’s a reason that a trace happens really quick…
When a trace is requested, it doesn’t go “backwards” to the MFR…it goes forward “FROM” the MFR. Lets say there is a crime committed with a gun. The investigating authority (local PoPo, Sheriff, etc…) contacts the Tracing Center, and requests a trace. They provide the info from the gun that was retrieved at the scene (make/model/caliber/serial num).
ATF contacts the MFR with the info on the gun. MFR has 24 hours to respond or face fines. Usually within 2 hours of a trace request, MFR responds and tells ATF the company they sold the gun to (usually the distributor/wholesaler).
ATF contacts dist/wholesaler, provides info of gun, with approximate date of sale from the MFR to DIST. Within a couple hours, DIST responds (again, under stiff penalty of fines for non-compliance) and provides sale date and name of gun store that they sold to.
ATF contacts gun store, give gun info and approximate date of sale from DIST to Gun Store. Gun Store looks up in its records who the FIRST LEGAL PURCHASER was (ie: who filled out the 4473 background check paperwork). Gun Store provides identifying information about the first purchaser, faxes copy of 4473 to ATF. ATF then contacts original PoPo agency, and provides information on the first legal purchaser of the gun.
PoPo get a warrant and goes to the home of first legal purchaser. Turns out that he sold the gun to his neighbor. Neighbor sold the gun in parking lot of gun show. Trail goes cold.
This is why the Anti’s want universal BG checks. They want to be able to trace a gun through private sales, so that it doesn’t go cold. Problem is, most legal guns aren’t used in crimes, so its still a bullshit system, but its the system we need to use because Federal Law says so.
September 28th, 2016 at 3:39 pm
I bet Mother Jones managed to “research” that without even running into the problems BATFE has maintaining the much smaller, much more invasive, not-at-all-hobbled NFA list.
(Yep, gave them the page hit to see, and they at least don’t mention it. But why would they? It’d undercut the narrative of a Competent Do-Good Agency Hamstrung By The Wicked NRA.)
September 29th, 2016 at 12:16 pm
Thanks, DragonLW.