More on mexican Drug Guns

Funny how they gun crowd wants to say they either don't exist, or are Obama's fault...

from InSight - Organized Crime in the Americas

InSight Crime Analysis

The case is an example of a method commonly used by Mexican drug gangs to get weapons, commissioning “straw buyers,” who usually have clean criminal records, to circumvent laws that prevent foreigners from buying guns in the US. Once legally purchased, the guns are smuggled into Mexico. Indeed, last year a high-ranking member of the Zetas told the authorities that all of the group's guns were bought in the United States and smuggled into Mexico across the Rio Grande.

Despite some attempts by the Obama administration to stem the flow of weapons across the border, there is little political will for real reform to US gun control legislation. The furor over the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' (ATF) botched “Fast and Furious” operation, which critics say allowed guns to “walk” across the border in the hopes of building cases against more high-ranking criminals in Mexico, has made gun control reform an even more heated issue.

Contralinea magazine detailed the routes by which guns are trafficked into Mexico, including the flow of arms from the U.S. directly to Guatemala, and then over Mexico's southern border in a piece from November 2011.

For two decades, [Mexico's] southern border has been a port of entry for the weapons that feed the country's black market. There are 956 miles of border between Mexico and Guatemala, where it is enough to arrive to cities like Ciudad Hidalgo, Ciudad Cuauhtemoc, or in border towns like Corozal, Talisman or Carmen Xhan, cross the checkpoints and walk around Tecun Uman, La Mesilla, Peten, El Carmen and Gracias a Dios to be offered weapons. Salesmen in shacks, adobe huts, or in the middle of the street offer the old M-16s and Galils that the Central American civil wars left behind; or more modern weapons, like the M72 and AT4 (anti-tank rockets), RPG-7 rocket-launchers, or 37-millimeter MGL grenade-launchers, with tracers and armor-piercing capacity, sold by catalogue, and a one-week wait before delivery.

The weapons arrive mostly from the United States, through air or maritime routes to Guatemala for distribution in Mexico, Central America, or South America. The advantage that this market offers is that purchases can be made without any middlemen, and that crossing is much easier than on the northern border.

Weapons acquired in Guatemala to supply the black market in Mexico are transported using the “hormiga” method, among the belongings of those who cross the border between the two countries -- identified as one of the most porous in the world. Or, if they are large shipments, they are transported along the Suchiate River, or in secret compartments in vehicles that cross the border, or in collusion with immigration and customs officials.

 So, what is it?  Are US guns feeding the Mexican Drug cartels,. or is it rubbish? 

It sounds more like lax US firearms laws are feeding the drug cartels to me and the NRA is pointing out its policies of fighting any reasonable regulation is the cause.

a FAIR take on Fast and Furious -- and the errors of fact on the right

I would not advocate believing Eban's piece in Fortune on Fast and Furious, if it did not pass fact-checking (she's known for her meticulous, award winning research - and she isn't putting that rep at risk in this piece) and the sniff test.  It passes with flying colors on both counts.

Literally, from FAIR, a site on factual reporting, spotlighting bias in the media:

Media Advisory

Not So Fast on Fast & Furious
CBS sold 'scandal' on false premises
7/3/12

If you've paid much attention to media reports about the "Fast and Furious" scandal, you may be under the impression that government agencies inexplicably allowed guns to be purchased in the United States and shipped across the border to drug lords in Mexico, where they ended up being connected to the December 2010 death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

Soon after Terry's death, the story bloomed into a political scandal, with conservative lawmakers demanding to know who was behind the program. Barack Obama has claimed executive privilege to block the release of internal Justice Department communications about the program. That led to a congressional vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt.

But an investigation in Fortune (6/27/12) shows that there are serious holes in the Fast & Furious narrative told by right-wing media--and, most influentially, by the CBS Evening News.

The most obvious question about the program--run out of a Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)--is one journalists are taught to ask first: Why? Why wouldn't law enforcement officials arrest gun buyers in this country who were placing unusually large orders of powerful weapons and shipping them to Mexican drug gangs? According to the story told by CBS, the point was to let guns "walk" in order to catch the bigger fish on the other side of the border.

Risky as that sounds, some on the right have accused the program of having even more sinister aims: The Obama administration, they charge, deliberately let guns fall into the hands of criminals, hoping to use the ensuing crisis to push for new, more restrictive gun laws. Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, who has championed the scandal, raised this possibility in an appearance before the NRA. (ABC's Jake Tapper questioned Issa about his remarks on June 24.)

But according to the new investigation by Fortune's Katherine Eban, the real story is very different. As Eban wrote:

Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that [local ATF official Dave] Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths and even some outright lies.

One key fact is that Arizona, home to many "straw buyers," boasts incredibly lax gun laws. As a result, local prosecutors would not prosecute the drug cartels' gun buyers--because, they said, charges wouldn't stand up in court. The permissive gun laws that make it exceedingly difficult to indict suspicious gun buyers, Eban points out, are championed by groups like the NRA. Eban noted the irony:

Republicans who support the National Rifle Association and its attempts to weaken gun laws are lambasting ATF agents for not seizing enough weapons--ones that, in this case, prosecutors deemed to be legal.

Indeed, ATF agents compiled what they believed to be detailed cases against specific buyers--20 suspects paying $350,000 for over 600 guns as of January 2010. One suspect--who was apparently receiving food stamps--had purchased $300,000 worth of firearms in six months.

[Let me interject here into the FAIR piece, that in the operation in Minnesota which was the forerunner to this effort by the ATF, there was NOT a similar problem with a willingness to pursue prosecution; however there WAS a problem with adequate resources to pursue the cases that the ATF produced.  The prosecutors couldn't come close to handling the cases produced in a gang activity focused task force's results.  The problem in a sense was the opposite of AZ; too many, not too few.]

But prosecutors thought otherwise, as Eban explained:

It was nearly impossible in Arizona to bring a case against a straw purchaser. The federal prosecutors there did not consider the purchase of a huge volume of guns, or their handoff to a third party, sufficient evidence to seize them. A buyer who certified that the guns were for himself, then handed them off minutes later, hadn't necessarily lied and was free to change his mind. Even if a suspect bought 10 guns that were recovered days later at a Mexican crime scene, this didn't mean the initial purchase had been illegal. To these prosecutors, the pattern proved little. Instead, agents needed to link specific evidence of intent to commit a crime to each gun they wanted to seize.

Eban's investigations shows that ATF officials were forced to go to considerable lengths--involving wiretaps of suspected recruiters--in order to build cases that prosecutors would follow up. But wiretap applications dragged on in some cases. Prosecutors did not step in, Eban reports, until the Terry murder--at which point 20 suspects were indicted.

So why did Fast & Furious become a national scandal? Obama's claim of executive privilege certainly aroused suspicion, and some genuine concern about government transparency. Conservative media have been obsessed with the story. But the "scandal," as Eban shows, gained a national platform thanks mostly to CBS Evening News and reporter Sharyl Attkisson.

Attkisson's first report (3/3/11) alleged that her ATF agent source, whose job is to "stop gun trafficking across the border," was told to do something else:

He says he was ordered to sit by and watch it happen. Investigators call the tactic letting guns walk. In this case, into the hands of criminals who would use them in Mexico and the U.S.

Attkisson told viewers that "the idea was to see where the guns ended up, build a big case and take down a major cartel." She added that the ATF "not only allowed the guns to walk, they videotaped it."

This was how CBS reporters consistently described the operation: "ATF was allegedly allowing Mexican drug cartels be armed with assault rifles from the U.S.," Attkisson explained (3/4/11). Anchor Bob Schieffer (10/3/11) told viewers that

the idea was to allow illegal guns to be shipped into Mexico so investigators could be traced where they were going and get a better handle on where Mexico's criminal cartels were operating. The program has been a disaster.

[Another interjection here - I watched the original airing of that episode of Face the Nation.  No one was questioning - and they should have - the explanation for what happened.  BAD reporting.  I thought there was something missing at the time -- the prosecutor aspect.]
And on June 20, 2012, Attkisson offered this recap of the story:

In late 2009, ATF agents in Phoenix noticed a flurry of gun purchases in the United States by suspected traffickers from Mexican drug cartels, including giant 50-caliber rifles. But instead of stopping the weapons, agents say their superiors ordered them to let the guns cross the border. It's called gun walking, to see where they ended up and see if they would lead to a major drug cartel leader.

The Fortune investigation demonstrates that CBS's reporting of the story is, at best, highly misleading. There was, in fact, no plan to purposely allow guns to flow into Mexico. What there was, rather, was a belief that applicable gun laws made it impossible to legally seize the guns.

That flawed assumption formed the basis of CBS's reporting on the issue. And Eban notes that in one CBS segment (3/3/11), Attkisson shaped the facts to match that storyline:

There was so much opposition to the gun walking that an ATF supervisor issued this e-mail noting a schism among the agents.

That is inaccurate. As Eban reports, the "schism" involved office politics-- including "petty arguing" and "adolescent behavior." It was not an argument over the supposed ATF plan to let guns flow to drug cartels. (The Fortune website includes the entire memo.)
What about the gun that was found at the scene of Brian Terry's murder? According to CBS's Attkison (3/3/11), "Two assault rifles ATF had let walk nearly a year before, similar to these, were found at Terry's murder." But Eban points out, the guns in question were purchased legally. By the time the ATF was notified by the gun dealer, "the legally purchased guns had been gone for three days. The agents had never seen the weapons and had no chance to seize them."

The Fortune investigation calls into question the very foundation of the story that has been reported by major news outlets. And it documents the impact of lax gun laws, which would seem to be the main factor limiting law enforcement from stopping these weapons transfers.

In the wake of the Fortune story, more information is coming out that challenges the CBS storyline. NBC Nightly News (6/29/12) interviewed former ATF agent William Newell, who said: "The notion that we somehow intentionally let guns walk is insane. It never happened."
[This brings us to the crux of so many conservative conspiracy theories -- they are full of holes, they aren't factually accurate, and they should be implausible on the surfact to anyone who engages in critical thinking.  Consistently, the right FAILS utterly to ask the right questions or to pursue honest answers instead of answers and fantasies that conform to their ideology.]
But CBS Evening News, which did so much to turn this story into a national scandal, does not appear to have followed up on the Fast & Furious story since the Fortune piece came out.

The Stink of Right Wing Corruption in the Fast and Furious Scandal

I'm tired of hearing the whining and complaining and the unsupported blaming from the right that they dont get fair coverage in the media. The Nut Gingrich claims of media bias in his campaigning was just one example.

Right wing media simply makes things up, or fails to multi-source or otherwise accurately report news. They play to conspiracy theories and insane premises that demonize the left -- notably the claims of voter fraud and of union corruption.

Consistently, they have no proof for their conspiracies, but they flog them mercilessly.

Consistently, they largely ignore any stories, no matter how well researched and credible, that differ from that conspiracy flogging propaganda they promote. We are far from the days where our media was held to a better standard of fact, the days of Edward R. Murrow, the days of Walter Cronkite.

Our low-information voters believe that it couldn't be reported in the media if it weren't true -- like those good old days of factual journalism, where the media had standards.

We are in a 'post-truth' era -- and that should make us angry, and that should move us to push back for an era of truth.

There are still GOOD reporters, the reporters who deserve Pulitzers, reporters who fact check thoroughly, and who are careful to tell the truth, to be factual and not to overreach beyond what they can prove or demonstrate.

Locally I saw that in the reporting of Dan Browning. I was impressed with his journalism; he was a meticulous researcher, and an ethical reporter of facts.

Nationally, I am similarly impressed with the exceptional investigative reporting efforts of Katherine Eban.

Fortune magazine, which produces the Fortune 500 lists every year, is no rag, no tabloid, no Daily Mail. It has been a prestigious magazine, a rival to Forbes, dating back to its founding in 1930 by Henry Luce. It has been for nearly a century one of the most respected magazines in this nation, primarily for business and economic reporting.

Eban wrote an award winning book about tainted drugs and counterfeit drugs in our health care system. Her reporting has appeared in a wide range of media, both print and broadcast, notably in the New York Times, and on Night Line and 60 Minutes.

Eban's reporting stands up to the closest scrutiny and to the most rigorous challenges -- like good reporting used to do regularly. Her reporting is UNlike the right wing media, which consistently cannot stand up to scrutiny or factual challenge.

For a long time, I have wondered why it is that anyone would believe the ATF or the DoJ simply overlooked the transfer of guns over our borders. It has never made sense to me that they were just incapable of tracking those guns, or that they didn't care very much about NOT allowing firearms to fall into the wrong hands.

That was implausible on the face of it. Why would they do that? The explanation of incompetence did not seem justified; the ATF and the DoJ are not incompetent, and when they have a failing - and agencies sometimes DO have failures, including some massive ones (the Department of Interior has had some horrific ones, for example), they aren't like this, they follow a different pattern.

When there are massive failures in government, regardless of which party is in charge, consistently if you follow the money trail, someone is profiting. There was no such trail claimed or demonstrated in the case of the ATF and DoJ.

No motivation was ever posited, except for another ridiculous conspiracy theory spouted by the NRA that was more full of holes than a target at a shooting range.

When you factor in that the program began under George W. Bush, but was only being used to discredit Obama so very selectively, the stink factor of something rotten from the right got much stronger.

What I don't understand is why this wasn't being investigated sooner, and better, by anyone other than Eban. And what I don't understand is why the larger media, both print and broadcast, hasn't been doing more to announce this stunning expose.

The criticism from the lunatic fringies like the Breitbart blog, or distortion non-journalists like Fox News, don't offer credible facts to counter Eban's reporting. There is NO credible evidence that refutes her research and documentation.

From Eban's Report on Fast and Furious:
We need an investigation into lax laws and into prosecutorial incompetence, or possibly corruption. I am guessing that we won't see anything of the kind from the inherently dishonest Congressman Issa, who is simply playing at dirty politics.

We need more reporters like Eban, we need more integrity and less right wing post-truth ideology from the new media of the blogosphere, and more critical thinking and fact checking.

Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.

Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.

How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It’s a story that starts with a grudge, specifically Dodson’s anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Rep. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election. (A Justice Department spokesperson denies this and asserts that the department is not drawing conclusions until the inspector general’s report is submitted.)

“Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false,” says Linda Wallace, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigation unit who was assigned to the Fast and Furious team (and recently retired from the IRS). A self-described gun-rights supporter, Wallace has not been criticized by Issa’s committee.

Isn't the normal, reasonable question that should be asked, how was it legal for these straw purchasers to buy these guns in the first place? Isn't the logical question, why weren't local prosecutors or law enforcement at the state and local level arresting or prosecuting these crimes?

It was never the case that the surveillance by ATF was watching the ONLY straw purchase activity. That activity has been documented over and over and over; it was widespread.

It is STILL widespread in Arizona. Where is the outrage that it continues and that the laws in the state of Arizona and elsewhere ALLOW it? This is clearly not about restricting legal gun purchases to lawful gun owners; this is purely and entirely about stopping intentionally ILLEGAL gun traffic. This is something over which we should all be able to unite, so why is it the Republicans and the NRA are opposing it?

Oh yeah -- that might reduce gun sales, and given the role of the NRA as lobbyists for the gun manufacturers, in ALEC and more directly, that would cut into the illegal gun sales that make money for those special interests, money which can fairly be termed bloody money.

Follow the money -- who profits from this activity? The gun dealers do, and the gun manufacturers do, and there is a clear trail of money as well to the right wing politicians.

The same rule appleis that always applies. Follow the money, in this case the dirty right wing blood stained money.

The right likes to give loud and repetitive lip service to the word Freedom. When you hear that kind of abuse of the word, it should alert you to the fact that there is misdirection present, it should put you on notice that they are trying to disguise the reality.

It is a clear case of the wonderful line from the Wizard of Oz, "don't look at the man behind the curtain'.

Eban looked, Eban wrote, and Eban is still pointing. You should be looking too, and sniffing the stink of right wing corruption, and objecting.

Our own state of Minnesota, and the city of Minneapolis receive a mention in the Eban expose. We do things differently here than in gun-crazy gun-corrupt Arizona:

Voth was a logical thinker. . He lived by advice he received from an early mentor in law enforcement: “There’s what you think. There’s what you know. There’s what you can prove. And the first two don’t count.”

But he was not operating in a logical world. The wiretap represented the ATF’s best—perhaps only— hope of connecting the gun purchases it had been documenting to orders from the cartels, according to Hurley. In Minneapolis, the prosecutors Voth had worked with had approved wiretap applications within 24 hours. But in Phoenix, days turned into weeks, and Group VII’s wiretap application languished with prosecutors in Arizona and Washington, D.C.

No one has yet explained this delay. Voth thinks prosecutor Hurley’s inexperience in wiretapping cases may have slowed the process. Several other agents speculate that Arizona’s gun culture may have led to indifference. Hurley is an avid gun enthusiast, according to two law-enforcement sources who worked with him. One of those sources says he saw Hurley behind the counter at a gun show, helping a friend who is a weapons dealer.

Rachel Maddow on Fast and Furiously Ridiculous

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Fast, and Furiously Funny

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Unraveling the "Fast & Furious" Scandal
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Of course, Fake news omits to mention that this was a Dubya scheme, that it involved 2,000 guns in the larger traffic of tens of thousands across the border FROM the U.S. TO Mexico.

Yeah, THAT is not creating a fake crisis. It is gross misrepresentation of the problem. Why does the right support these lies? Where are their values?

But it gets better, when Colbert goes after Joe-the-Candidate-for-Plumber.

Btw, if you watch the Dos Equs ad that precedes it, there is a very nice, very representative example of my dog breed of choice lying in the "trophy wife" beer ad. Home invaders are more afraid of encountering that in the dark than they are of guns; it operates around corners and you don't have to be able to see your bad guy to get him, especially when there is more than one, and they know how to work cooperatively on their prey.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Controversial Gun Control Ad from Ohio Congressional Candidate
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

The Tucson Shooting Hero, Patricia Maisch, Speaks Her Mind

Politico reports

Hearing of Issa’s “plan to spend more of [his] time and our precious tax dollars on contempt charges against Attorney General Eric Holder,” Maisch wrote, only reminded her of painful memories from the “political games” following the Tucson shooting.

Holder was the “only one talking about the need for common sense gun laws, including a better background check system and tougher laws to fight gun trafficking,” she continued, according to the letter obtained by POLITICO.

“While we cannot turn on our televisions without hearing about ‘Fast & Furious,’ neither Congress nor the President have taken any action to fix the system,” Maisch wrote in a letter to Issa and Oversight Committee ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.). “In the year and a half since that horrible day, the failings of our legislators to take even one single step to help prevent more senseless murders, is more than a disappointment to us, it is a slap in our collective faces.”

What's your opinion? Could it be that all the attention placed on the Fast and Furious scandal is a diversion more than anything else?

That's what I thought from the very beginning.

What do you think?  Please leave a comment.

Fast and Furious Made Simple

via Slinking towards Retirement

Again, there’s no question that Fast and Furious represents a serious failure of federal law enforcement, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone if those responsible for that failure were less than eager to inform superiors in Washington about their mistakes. However, the inspector general’s investigation and the investigation by Issa’s committee should help lay out exactly what happened.

However, there’s something deeper going on here as well, and it’s reflected in the comments from LaPierre and others.

The flow of firearms across the U.S. border is a serious challenge. So far, some 65,000 guns confiscated in Mexico by authorities have been traced back to gun purchases made here in the United States. One single individual tracked during the Fast and Furious investigation bought more than 700 weapons for transfer to the Mexican cartels, in some cases purchasing 20 or more AK-47-type assault weapons in a single purchase.

However, when the Obama administration proposed a new regulation that would require border-state gun shops to notify officials if a single individual attempted to buy large numbers of guns, the NRA protested bitterly.

“This is just a shallow excuse to engage in a sweeping firearms registration scheme,” LaPierre wrote on the NRA’s website. At the NRA’s insistence, the House passed a resolution opposing that regulation, and the NRA has since filed suit against the rule.

Some of the pro-gun sites have dedicated themselves to making more of this than there is. I knew it was coming a while ago when Wayne La Pierre pretended to be emotional about the situation. That's all it takes for his minions to take up the cause and run with it.

This is all about ATF-hate, gun-control-hate and Obama-hate. That's all.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Fast and Furious Inquiry

I applaud an investigation into this badly flawed if well-intentioned effort.  That is, if it is a REAL investigation, and not simply political theater of the absurd, and useless ad nauseum politics (which would include pretty much anything from congressmen Issa and King, among others). 

From the STrib:

House committee issues subpoena to Justice Department in guns-to-Mexico scandal

• Article by: Associated Press
• Updated: October 12, 2011 - 11:12 AM

WASHINGTON - The House's main investigative committee has subpoenaed Attorney General Eric Holder and other Justice Department officials, seeking records from a law enforcement operation gone wrong that resulted in high-powered weapons flowing into Mexico.

The subpoena Wednesday asked Holder and others to supply records related to "Operation Fast and Furious."

The subpoena was issued by the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Republican Chairman Darrell Issa said top Justice Department officials, including Holder, know more about the operation than they have publicly acknowledged.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed intermediaries for drug cartels to buy thousands of weapons from Arizona gun shops and lost track of about 1,400 of the 2,000 guns. Some of those weapons have been recovered at crime scenes in Mexico.

The Fast and Furious Story Without the Hype

Huffington Post contributor Adam Winkler described it clearly and simply.

Now that Republicans in Congress won important concessions from President Obama in the debt ceiling debate, the next partisan battle is likely to be over what promises to be the first major scandal of the Obama administration: the botched gun sting known as "Operation Fast and Furious." The administration should waste no time and come clean about what happened, who approved it, and how it can be avoided again.

Unfortunately, the early signs are that Obama is going to handle this controversy as poorly as he handled the debt ceiling debate.

Professor Winkler goes on to point out that the cover-up is probably worse than the crime. Sting operations are used by law enforcement all the time. Sometimes you have to allow smaller crimes to occur so that you can capture the people behind far bigger crimes.
 
The real problem is all the attempts to stonewall and shirk responsibility. The NRA, which has long demonized Holder for his support of gun control, will continue to put pressure until he goes down, if possible. Naturally they'd try to destroy Obama with this too.

Around here we've written about this a number of times, including a wonderfully brief synopsis that JadeGold submitted.

Now, this is not to say any operation that is ill-advised or poorly executed shouldn't be investigated and those responsible demoted or fired, if need be.  But once more, the gunloons, in their phony outrage, have overreached. 

"Phony outrage" is exactly what it is. On the Sipsey Street Irregulars it's daily fare. And Farago is next in line with the exaggerated coverage (propaganda).

So, what's it really all about?  I'll tell you. It's the NRA vs the ATF. It's that simple. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is reviled by the NRA and many gun onwers as the symbolic representation of gun-rights opposition. ATF agents literally appear as the jack-booted oppressors who stand at the van of all common-sense gun control movements. As such they are the enemy of the Constitution and deserving of opprobrium.

Here's phoney outrage personified. 

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.