Wow, I can’t even begin to count the number of anti-gun memes in this article. Let’s count them shall we?
First we have the title which brings up the “big scary evil gun lobby that kicks puppies:”
ATF’s oversight limited in face of gun lobby
See that? The ATF’s oversight is limited because of the puppy kicking “gun lobby.” Those irresponsible lobbyists! How dare they work to defend a right confirmed in the Constitution this country was founded on! Meme two is the fact that there is no central database of gun purchases:
The government is prohibited from putting gun ownership records into an easily accessible format, such as a searchable computer database.
Most anti-gunners will claim such a database wouldn’t count as registration but it most certainly does. Any system that has a list of firearms sold and who purchased them is a registration system by default. Meme three is the claim that the ATF hasn’t the resources to complete this mission:
The agency still has about the same number of agents it had nearly four decades ago: 2,500. The firearms bureau inspects only a fraction of the nation’s 60,000 retail gun dealers, taking as much as eight years between visits to stores. By law, the ATF cannot require dealers to conduct a physical inventory to determine whether any guns have been lost or stolen.
Oh no! Not only can the ATF not handle the workload they already have but many guns are purchased from private entities (bonus points to the story writer who didn’t directly say “gun show loophole:”
Depending on how well a dealer keeps records, a firearms trace can take hours or weeks. But one-third of all gun traces come from the records of out-of-business gun dealers. In those cases, there is no one to call.
I’m going to just pull over for a side note and bring up this quote:
“Katrina was a mess,” Houser said.
Damn right it was! Katrina was a classic example of gun confiscation. The National Guard actually went in to New Orleans and stole peoples’ means of self-defense. Shit like this is a classic example of why gun owners are afraid of any registration system, then the government knows where to go to confiscate firearms. Of course this article wasn’t talking about that fact when they quote somebody saying Katrina was a mess. Oh no:
Gun dealers all over the Gulf Coast region were driven out of business by the hurricane, and they sent their wet and mildewing records to Martinsburg. For months, paper files sat in the center’s parking lot, drying in the sun.
The Mexico meme made a guest appearance in this article as well:
The difficulties at the tracing center have slowed efforts to trace guns seized from crime scenes all over the country – as well as in Mexico, where most of the seized weapons come from U.S. gun dealers, according to congressional reports.
Traces are most useful within the first few days, but it took the ATF an average of about two weeks to complete traces of firearms recovered in Mexico between 2004 and 2008, according to a congressional report last year on the ATF’s efforts to combat arms trafficking to that country. In addition, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General said the ATF doesn’t have enough Spanish-speaking personnel and has been slow in developing a tracing system in Spanish.
I wonder if the author was getting paid by the meme for this article. And yet again the author brings up the meddling gun lobby:
Meanwhile, the change requiring Senate confirmation for an ATF chief allowed the gun lobby to have a say on Capitol Hill about the agency’s leadership.
Yet another meme is the ATF doesn’t have the legal authority to fulfill its mission:
The ATF’s hands are often tied when it comes to regulating dealers, according to interviews with current and former agency officials, as well as thousands of pages of internal files obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Yes those bastards have to follow the letter of the law! How horrible!
It’s impressive that the author was able to fit all that bullshit into one article. The only thing missing was a blurb about children.