See if you can spot the agenda behind this NYT story on the ATF.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has been without a permanent director for six years, as President Obama recently noted. But even if someone were to be confirmed for the job, the agency’s ability to thwart gun violence is hamstrung by legislative restrictions and by loopholes in federal gun laws, many law enforcement officials and advocates of tighter gun regulations say.
For example, under current laws the bureau is prohibited from creating a federal registry of gun transactions. So while detectives on television tap a serial number into a computer and instantly identify the buyer of a firearm, the reality could not be more different.
When law enforcement officers recover a gun and serial number, workers at the bureau’s National Tracing Center here — a windowless warehouse-style building on a narrow road outside town — begin making their way through a series of phone calls, asking first the manufacturer, then the wholesaler and finally the dealer to search their files to identify the buyer of the firearm.
About a third of the time, the process involves digging through records sent in by companies that have closed, in many cases searching by hand through cardboard boxes filled with computer printouts, hand-scrawled index cards or even water-stained sheets of paper.
In an age when data is often available with a few keystrokes, the A.T.F. is forced to follow this manual routine because the idea of establishing a central database of gun transactions has been rejected by lawmakers in Congress, who have sided with the National Rifle Association, which argues that such a database poses a threat to the Second Amendment. In other countries, gun rights groups argue, governments have used gun registries to confiscate the firearms of law-abiding citizens.
And in this country, some in the media abuse the Freedom of Information Act to paint scarlet letters on law-abiding gun owners. The New York Times is jealous of the Westchester Journal-News and wishes it could do nationally, what that paper did locally this week. It hides this agenda behind the old “advocates say” trick.
Advocates for increased gun regulation, however, contend that in a country plagued by gun violence, a central registry could help keep firearms out of the hands of criminals and allow law enforcement officials to act more effectively to prevent gun crime.
Can ya quote one? Can they explain how keeping tabs on the law-abiding will help stop criminals, who by definition live outside the law?
Click to the story’s second page and you’ll see a very rare thing: The New York Times mentions Fast and Furious.
Mr. Gottlieb said the “low point” [for the ATF] came with the bungled gun trafficking investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious, in which A.T.F. agents, in an effort to trace guns to a network based in Arizona, did not quickly intervene as the weapons were smuggled over the border to Mexico. Last Wednesday, in a development that may inflame the controversy further, Mr. Grassley sent letters to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General demanding an investigation and requesting more information about why a gun bought by an A.T.F. agent involved in Operation Fast and Furious was found at the scene of a homicide in Mexico.
It’s Sen. Grassley’s fault for “inflaming” things with his notions about accountability. Shame on him!
Read the whole thing. The bottom line is that the Times wants a national gun database. The entire point of the news article is to editorialize in favor of one.
Registration then confiscation, only faster.
do they actually think that if a gun is registered a criminal won’t steal it? Or are they thinking he’ll leave a receipt with his name and address on it so the victim/owner can point LE towards the current” owner when it is found at the scene of a crime?
Any time I think we’ve reached our limit of stupidity, some liberal proves me wrong.
Why so much fear over a database? They have one for everything else… They have one of everyone in the country, its called the Social Security Administration. They have one for cars, its called the DMV. They have records of doctors, (AMA)Lawyers (the bar association) etc. etc. Every distillery in the country has a federal id so they can pay their excise taxes. We allow Congress to spy on us with “Warrantless Wiretaps”, but guns are off limits? We keep records of DNA, fingerprints, footprints, and dental records, what is different about registering a weapon? We should re examine our values as a society when we ban books in schools that teach evolution as part of biology, but we allow guns in schools. Does anyone think that a teacher having a 9mm, hell even a .50 cal Dessert Eagle, is going to stand a chance against a .223? Effective range of a handgun is 50 ft at best if you’re trained. Anyone can pull a .223, point and shoot and have an effective range of 200 yards (without any optics). I own both a .223 and handguns, and wouldn’t mind a bit if I had to register them federally. I also know that I would leave my Sig .40 with 10 rounds in its holster if a gunman was on a rampage with a .223 with a 100 round drum mag.
Perhaps we need a national database and licensing system for journalists. We’d publish their names and addresses online. Only journalists properly licensed and regulated by the government would be allowed to write and publish information. After all, if we’re going to proscribe the 2nd Amendment, why not the First? What could possibly go wrong?
[\sarc]
Yeah well, here in “The Great White North”, during the long LIBRANO regime, Canada’s corrupt version of the DEMONcRATs, Bill 68 was foisted upon us with assurances that the intent was not confiscation.
Long after Royal Assent, our equivalent of a POTUS endorsement, and the implementation date delayed due to non-compliance, Alan Rock, Attorney General called upon Canada’s Police to vigourously seek out “unregistered/illegal firearms. The lower levels of the Police, mindful of bad public relations….said NO.
The point is the NRA mantra of “registration leads to confiscation” has once again been proven.
A feature of the inept registry was the lack of security with the on-line registry…leading to targeted home invasion fo collectors.
Printouts from the registry recovered at some of these “hot burgleries”, mysteriously disappeared….not lost…never in the incident reports.
One of the freatures of Bill C68 was “safe storage”, deliberate separate storage of ammo and firearms…..to prevent their use in defence. Alan Rock specifically declared the self defence was not an approved use of firearms.
He declared his goal was to limit firearms to the police and military.
This boondoggle never succeeded to do anything other than provide employment for the party faithful.
Recently Parliament repealed “the long gun registry” but the bureaucracy more or less mutinied, needing severe enforcement by our AG and SG/Police (just short of martial law) to finally scrap the registry….
Don’t you know future socialism will always succeed where historical and existing socialism has failed? Just because you Canucks couldn’t spend billions to make it work doesn’t mean that we Americans can’t spend tens of billions making it work. We are so smart here in the 11th Provence that we can do anything. Just watch us do government healthcare!
But seriously, Feinstein is so detached from reality that she doesn’t see the coming collapse of law and order in her home state as California’s cities and towns go bankrupt and no longer provide any effective police protection. Just look at Detroit where gangs rule the streets because the bankrupt City can no longer provide real protection. Someone ought to ask her how she expects people defend themselves when there are few police officers left.
One of the things that caused me to quit conservatism and become an independent.
What part of ‘shall not be infringed’ do you people not understand?
You wanna fix the problem of FOIA requests that include government databases of gunowners?
‘Shall not be infringed’ fixes that. In short, gun registration, licensing and permits are un-constitutional to begin with. What has been done is called ‘judicial activism.’ The Constitution was never amended to include government licensing and regulation of gun ownership.
Yet, conservatives claim that they are being, somehow, ‘patriotic’ and ‘law abiding’ citizens when they obey an illegal and un-constititonal law. …who now complain, bitterly, that their names are on a government list that is now available to the public.
‘Shall not be infringed’ was originally designed to prevent that sort of thing. iow, you’re supposed to be free to own guns. Getting permission from the government to own a gun is not freedom. It’s the opposite of freedom. It’s the opposite of patriotism. It’s the opposite of ‘law-abiding.’
When the government comes for your guns, it has a list. You gave them that list, yourselves. They know where you live. There’s an implied threat in being required to get permission from the government to exercise a constitutional right. You surrendered your freedom under threat of government force. That’s called ‘tyranny.’ Not freedom.
‘Shall not be infringed.’ Period.
Get rid of gun permits and licensing. Period.
…or admit that you love living under a tyranny.
You have to right to vote, but you must register. In some states you have to show an ID, if you are elderly or never had a driver’s license, you don’t get to vote. Register guns, the community should be protected.
Criminals don’t give a damn about the paperwork anyway.
More gun owners will conclude that they just don’t want to deal with the government’s paperwork.
Law of unintended consequences rears it’s ugly head.
What a coincidence. What timing.
Looks like a Christmas Pre-massacre Bill was put forward.
Constitutional slaughter time.
They just need to give it a festive name as with some of the other descriptive ones.
How about the Fast and Furious Memorial Constitutional Decimation for the Purposes of Enabling Mass Human Slaughter Act?
I am glad Fast and Furious is mentioned here, for the reason the Left is not to be trusted is this—information on guns held by respectable citizens that ought to remain private is made public; whereas information on guns held by criminals that ought to be made public remains private.
Both cases evidence an attitude that says the will of the Left shall not be thwarted, and that no matter the specific situation, the governing principle shall be “how do we get what we want?”
OK, but let’s also have a national database of how much money journalists, editors and the owners of the companies give to which politicians, to include favorable mentions of said politicians and negative mentions of the others counted at the same rate they sell ads for. That is to say: if they ran a pro-Obama story and an anti-Romney one, each 1 minute long, that would count the same as two, one-minute commercials for Obama and be added to the list by that dollar amount.