This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Guns

  • DoJ’s new rule ignores their culpability

    Old trooper sends a link to a Fox News article about the Justice Department’s new rule to burden gun retailers with record keeping and reporting to the government about frequent buyers of scary looking guns, while ignoring their own culpability in the “Fast and Furious” project. The Brady Campaign likes it, so you know you won’t;

    “This new reporting rule will give law enforcement new capacity to interdict these deadly guns before they can be used against Mexican police and citizens.”

    But the National Rifle Association (NRA) said it plans to sue the administration over the rule.

    “This is a blatant effort by the Obama administration and ATF to divert focus of Congress and the general public from their gross incompetence in the Fast and Furious scandal,” NRA executive director Chris Cox said in a statement.

    “This scheme will unjustly burden law-abiding retailers in border states,” he said. “It will not affect drug cartels and it won’t prevent violence along our borders.”

    It won’t affect the cartels because law-abiding gun retailers weren’t allowed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to stop straw purchases in their shops .

  • Wisconsin CCW within sight

    Fox News reports that Friday, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker signed Wisconsin’s Carry Concealed Weapon bill making it law in three months leaving the state of Illinois the only state in the union with no semblance of some sort of CCW permits for law abiding citizens. Still States like New York and Maryland make it impossible for most citizens to carry weapons to protect themselves.

    Reading the article, i was surprised to learn that Maryland only requires CCW permit applicants to view a thirty-minute video on line to certify their training. Here in West Virginia, I had to attend an eight hour class and actually shoot a weapon, but in Maryland, they get to sit through a little webinar. And when I drive across the Potomac, my permit is no longer valid until I drive 12 miles and into Pennsylvania.

    Of course, in Maryland, lawyers and doctors automatically qualify for application by virtue of their professions. I wonder who wrote that into the law?

    Us regular slobs have to prove with a police report that our lives are in danger. One poor slob was denied renewal of his permit last year when the guy who threatened his life was imprisoned.

    Now, I’m all for CCW permits, but a permit that only requires viewing a video is just begging for trouble…which may be the impetus behind the poorly-considered inadequate training. I urge Wisconsin lawmakers to not make the same mistake as Maryland and require real hands-on weapon safety classes. The whole purpose of CCW is to make society safer, not have a bunch of half-wit lawyers walking around with guns and itchy trigger fingers.

  • Cummings: Gun laws hinder BATFE’s border ops

    Elijah Cummings, a Democrat representative from Maryland – the State that only issues Concealed Carry Weapons licenses when you can prove that you’re in imminent danger – told a forum that the real problem with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is not that they supplied Mexican cartels with thousands of weapons to fight the Mexican government, it’s that US gun laws are too lax;

    Michael Bouchard, a retired ATF assistant director, said one of the ways his former agency strives to prevent crimes is by “disrupting and dismantling large and small firearms trafficking schemes, which put guns into the hands of violent criminals.”

    “Unfortunately, criminals bent on acquiring guns can be very clever in the methods that they use to circumvent the law and avoid detection,” he said. “ATF and law enforcement must continually adjust to the criminal’s changing tactics and develop new strategies and tactics of their own.”

    Apparently, criminals are so clever that they can stare at ATF agents and control their minds to let them walk with high powered weapons right into Mexico from US gun stores without being accosted. How do we fight that kind of cleverness?

    Brady Campaign President Paul Helmke blamed America’s gun laws on the illegal flow of U.S. guns into Mexico.

    “Yet as the six-month anniversary of Tucson approaches, we have still seen no change in our nation’s weak or non-existent gun laws,” he said. “We still have no federal law criminalizing gun trafficking, banning assault weapons and magazines or closing the loopholes in our Brady Background Check system that help arm dangerous killers and supply gun traffickers.

    Yes, we should ban scary-looking weapons so that the BATFE isn’t tempted to let gun smugglers abscond to Mexico with their ill-gotten booty. That makes perfect sense.

    Actually it proves more what the NRA and gun owners across the country have been saying – the whole problem isn’t the number and volume of laws, it’s law enforcement’s unwillingness to enforce laws. Smuggling weapons to Mexico is already illegal.

    I mean BATFE had an opportunity to stop thousands of weapons from going to the cartels and they preferred to look the other way under the guise of an “investigation”.

  • WaPo: Fast and furious; It’s your fault

    Yeah, during the BATFE’s braintsunami operation Fast and Furious, more than 2500 guns ‘walked across” the Mexican border from the US while agents sat on their hands. And whose fault is it? Why it’s you, the NRA and defenders of the Second Amendment, according to the Washington Post Editorial Board.

    THE GUN RIGHTS lobby has spent considerable time and energy in pursuit of one goal: crippling the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). It has largely succeeded — and with dire consequences.

    Crippling them to the point of making the entire agency a lawless gang of imbeciles? Ya know, it might have made sense if they tracked 10 guns to the eventual end user, maybe 50 guns…but on what planet did they need to let two thousand five hundred guns get into the hands of criminals?

    Of course, the Washington Post editorial board claims that we need stronger gun laws not more competent BATFE agents;

    Lawmakers should give the ATF the tools it needs to fight illegal gun trafficking. They should enact stronger penalties for straw purchases and craft a federal gun-smuggling statute; close the gun-show loophole, which allows buyers under certain circumstances to purchase weapons without a background check; resuscitate the ban on assault weapons; and give the ATF the authority to collect data on multiple sales of long guns in border states.

    Which of those things would have prevented BATFE agents from ending their operation? Because the fact that the BATFE engaged in this illegal operation is what caused it. Maybe the “scary looking rifle ban”…maybe. Gun dealers wanted to stop the obvious straw purchases, but the BATFE waved them off. 2500 times.

    I snagged this link from DrewM at Ace of Spades. You should read it, too.

  • Chicago’s top cop says gun laws are racist

    ROS sends us a link about Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy, who claims that Federal gun laws are killing “black and brown children”;

    McCarthy told parishioners an anecdote about a brutal night of killings in Newark, N.J., where he was previously head of the police department. McCarthy said that after he got home that night, he turn on the TV to relax, and tuned in to Sarah Palin’s Alaska.

    “She was caribou-hunting and talking about the right to bear arms,” McCarthy said. “Why wasn’t she at the crime scene with me?”

    McCarthy also told parishioners that “everybody is afraid of race. I’m not afraid of race.”

    In a statement Thursday, McCarthy said “strong gun laws against illegal firearms are critical in order to maintain public safety and private rights.”

    Hey, numbnuts, what does Sarah Palin legally hunting with a rifle in Alaska have to do with criminals blasting each other in New Jersey?

    And what does race have to with guns. Are you trying tell us that black people are so f**king ignorant that they can’t stop shooting each other when ever they come into contact with a gun? While i agree that illegal firearms are a serious problem, I can also admit out loud that there are sufficient laws on the books to prevent illegal guns from reaching criminals if incompetent boobs like you will take the time to enforce those laws instead of blaming legal gun owners and legal gun manufacturers for the problems in your community. Now will you admit that you’re nothing but a race baiting boob?

  • DoJ in “panic mode” over gun trafficking operation

    Fox News reports that the Justice Department is peeing in their collective drawers over the congressional investigation scheduled for next week being billed as “Reckless Decisions, Tragic Outcomes” regarding the “Fast and Furious” Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operation intended to stem the flow of guns from the US to Mexico but had the opposite effect;

    Mexican officials estimate 150 of their people have been shot by Fast and Furious guns. Police have recovered roughly 700 guns at crime scenes, 250 in the U.S. and the rest in Mexico, including five AK-47s found at a cartel warehouse in Juarez last month.

    A high-powered sniper rifle was used to shoot down a Mexican military helicopter. Two other Romanian-made AK-47s were found in a shoot-out that left 11 dead in the state of Jalisco three weeks ago.

    The guns were traced to the Lone Wolf Gun Store in Glendale, Ariz., and were sold only after the store employees were told to do so by the ATF.

    It is illegal to buy a gun for anyone but yourself. However, ATF’s own documents show it allowed just 15 men to buy 1,725 guns, and 1,318 of those were after the purchasers officially became targets of investigation.

    Arizona gun store owners say they were explicitly told by the ATF to sell the guns, sometimes 20, 30, even up to 40 in a single day to single person.

    And those orders, from at least one ATF case agent, are on audio recording.

    “We would say, ‘Do you (the ATF) want us to stop selling, is there something we should do here?’” Brad DeSayes, owner of J&G Gun Sales in Prescott, said. “And they would say, ‘No, no, no, keep selling – just tell us after the fact.’”

    Sure, when the real criminal is the gun, who’s to blame?

  • BATFE-monitored weapons found in the hands of drug cartels

    According to Fox News 5 assault rifles were found in a weapons cache by Mexican police which had been “watched” by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and allowed to cross the southern border during their attempts to track firearms smuggling;

    U.S. authorities have identified at least five Romanian-made AK-47-style rifles as having been purchased in the U.S. by suspects the ATF was tracking in the Fast and Furious operation. Documents from the ATF’s National Tracing Center detail the makes and serial numbers of the firearms, their recovery in Mexico, and dates in 2009 and 2010 when the ATF entered them into a database of suspect guns.

    So it’s the US Federal government that’s letting guns “walk” across the border, not regular US citizens like this Justice Department would have you believe.

    The Justice Department said last month that the Fast and Furious operation was first approved by the U.S. attorney’s office in Arizona and the ATF’s Phoenix field office, and later by a multiagency organized-crime task force.

    Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said: “The attorney general takes the allegations that have been raised seriously, which is why he has asked the inspector general to investigate and made clear to everyone in the department that under no circumstances should guns be allowed to cross the border.”

    Too late. They aren’t “allegations” now – weapons which the BATFE were “watching” ended up in a drug dealer’s house in Juarez. How much more needs to be proven?

  • Chicks and guns

    My favorite two subjects. What about chicks who write about guns?

    Nora Holloway, one of the two women who write the “Military Gear Blog” sent us a link to her latest post “8 Sniper Rifles to Take Down Terrorists“.

    Rifle technology has taken off since I had any interest in it.

    It usta be so easy to just point at the Remington Model 700 and grunt “sniper rifle”. Now I have to go a chick’s blog to learn about them.