Quote:

---

Over the last three decades, gun activists and lawmakers have purposefully hindered the ATF and carefully molded the agency that enforces gun laws to serve their own interests, stunting the ATF's budget, handicapping its regulatory authority, and keeping it effectively leaderless.

The problems are obvious. The agency that Obama said "works most closely with state and local law enforcement to keep illegal guns out of the hands of criminals" has the same of number of agents as the Phoenix Police Department. Its budget has barely budged in decades (as the Department of Homeland Security has grown flush with post-9/11 funding). It has fewer investigators than it did in 1973. And its acting (and part-time) director, B. Todd Jones, commutes to work from Minneapolis, where he works full-time as a US attorney. It hasn't had a permanent director for six years. The NRA blocked Obama's earlier appointee, Andrew Traver, in part because Traver had once attended a meeting of police chiefs that focused on gun control.

The 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, the first major piece of gun control legislation since the Capone days, led the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division of the Department of the Treasury to sprout a third responsibility: handguns. With the market for moonshine collapsed—due to a global spike in sugar prices—the division's primary investigative responsibility for most of its history withered. The new mandate to regulate arms sales filled the void. It also made the bureau a natural foil for the nascent gun lobby, and the NRA, whose leadership was fast transitioning from a moderate coalition of sportsmen to a band of true believers, went to work to make the agency a pariah.

Leading the charge was Reagan. On the campaign trail, he'd bashed the ATF and vowed to dissolve it. Once in Washington, Reagan, with the NRA's backing, proposed folding the ATF into the Secret Service—the two branches of the Treasury most unlike all the others. ATF agents would help the Secret Service handle its beefed-up responsibilities of campaign years and expand its investigative powers. It would have been a death sentence for the bureau.

But then the NRA had had a change of heart. The organization's strategists came to worry that if gun law enforcement was handed to the Secret Service, one of the few federal agencies with a reputation for competence, gun owners might actually have something to fear. And, they feared, that if the agency did become part of the Secret Service, they'd lose an easy target.

The NRA realized, "'Oh my God, we're gonna lose the ATF!'" recalls William Vizzard, a professor of criminology at California State University-Sacramento, who worked for bureau at the time. "It would have been like removing the Soviets during the Cold War, for the Defense Department—there's nobody to point to."

So the NRA coaxed a friendly lawmaker, Sen. James Abdnor (R-S.D.), into scuttling the merger by inserting language in a budget bill.

Once the NRA had saved the ATF, it focused on how to neuter it. Four years after bargaining for the preservation of the ATF, the NRA helped Congress formally handcuff the agency, in the form of the 1986 Firearms Owners Protection Act. The law, which included a handful of token regulations (such as a ban on machine guns), made it all but impossible for the government to prosecute corrupt gun dealers. It prohibited the bureau from compiling a national database of retail firearm sales, reduced the penalty for dealers who falsified sales records from a felony to a misdemeanor, and raised the threshold for prosecution for unlicensed dealing.

Perhaps most glaringly, the ATF was explicitly prohibited from conducting more than one inspection of a single dealer in a given year, meaning that once an agent had visited a shop, that dealer was free to flout the law.

But the NRA wasn't done; over the next decade-and-a-half, it worked with Congress to run up the score. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) launched a Firearms Legislation Task Force to hold hearings on perceived ATF abuses. His deputy, Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), called for the bureau to be disbanded. LaPierre, channeling Dingell, called ATF agents to "jackbooted thugs," prompting former president George H.W. Bush to resign his NRA membership.

During the George W. Bush administration, The gun lobby delivered another big blow. In 2003, Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) inserted a series of amendments into a Department of Justice appropriations bill that prohibited the ATF from sharing information on weapons traces to the general public—effectively restricting researchers from detecting trends and potential loopholes in current policy. (A 1996 NRA-backed budget likewise prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from studying the health effects of gun ownership.)

The same year, Congress, backed by the NRA, split the ATF off from the Department of Treasury and stipulated that its director be confirmed by the Senate, effectively giving the gun lobby veto power over who would run the agency. Since then, the ATF has simply gone leaderless. No nominee has been confirmed by the Senate after that policy went into effect—not even President Bush's pick. Without job security, acting ATF directors have had none of the political capital needed to reform the agency or run it at full throttle.

And the hits have kept on coming. Fox News analyst Dick Morris typified a resurgent line of 1990s thinking when he all but justified the murder of federal agents: "Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the UN's going to take over'—well, they're beginning to have a case."

The ATF's challenges haven't gone overlooked by the White House. In his remarks Wednesday afternoon, Obama outlined the urgency of making Jones a full-time director. More at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/atf-obama-gun-reform-contr
ol-alcohol-tobacco-firearms

---