NY Mayor Bloomberg Donates $150,000 to Pro Gun Control Virginia Politicians- After NYPD Cops Nabbed In Gunrunning Sting

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has opened up his checkbook for six Democrats running for the state office in Virginia ahead of Old Dominion's November 8th elections for state Senate and House of Delegates.

Bloomberg has donated $25,000 apiece to the campaigns of six Democratic candidates for the Virginia state Senate who share his strict beliefs on gun control, officials told the Daily News Friday.

The deep-pocketed mayor, who drew the ire of the Virginia attorney general when he ran gun stings there five years ago, will travel to Old Dominion to campaign for the candidates next week, the officials said.

What happens in the Virginia Legislature will directly affect the public safety of New Yorkers, said John Feinblatt, the mayor s Criminal Justice Coordinator.

Bloomberg was slammed by Virginia's then-attorney general - and now governor - Bob McDonnell for the 2006 stings.

The announcement comes a few days after 8 current and former NYPD officers were arrested by the FBI in a gunrunning sting where the officers are accused of trafficking in stolen property and purchasing guns from an undercover FBI agent before filing off the serial numbers.

The investigation into the conspiracy began in 2009, when an FBI informant was introduced to one cop, William Masso of the 68th Precinct, "as a person who could 'fix' the [informant's] traffic tickets," according to court papers obtained by the Post. But a law-enforcement official tells the tabloid that the probe was "totally unrelated" to the NYPD ticket-fixing scandal currently under investigation by the Bronx DA, who is expected to charge 16 officers soon.

In this case, the officers are accused of buying inoperable weapons, including an M-4 assault rifle, from an undercover FBI agent. They then allegedly filed off the serial numbers so they couldn't be traced, and transported them over state lines. Masso allegedly told his conspirators that they should carry their police badges, and if they ran into trouble with non-corrupt cops, to say they were cops working off-duty "delivering items purchased at auction."

"The criminal complaint lays out a scheme of brazen misconduct that include the illegal transportation of stolen cigarettes and stolen slot machines, the illegal transportation firearms, and the illegal transportation of defaced firearms," FBI's Special Agent in Charge, Diego Rodriguez, said in a statement this morning. "All of these crimes were seemingly committed for one simple reason: money. For their participation in the various schemes—cigarettes, slot machines, guns—the defendants were paid handsomely."

Interestingly, while the news of crooked NYPD cops allegedly trafficking black market guns with the serial numbers filed off was the most dramatic accusation made against them, the cigarette smuggling scheme the accused were reportedly involved in was their most lucrative.

The demand for cheap cigarettes in New York—which has the nation's highest tax levy, $6.46 a pack in the city—has fueled a burgeoning underground market that costs the city about $200 million a year and the state $525 million, city, state and federal officials said.

"Over the past decade we have seen a marked increase in contraband cigarettes coming into the greater New York area," Joseph Green, a spokesman for the ATF's New York office, said Wednesday.

The cigarette-smuggling operation actually made the defendants more money: Undercover investigators paid the defendants about three times as much money—about $92,000—for moving cigarettes than for the guns, the complaint said.

And unlike the guns the defendants sold in the federal sting operation, some of the 2.4 million cigarettes they allegedly smuggled appear to have made their way into the New York market, the complaint suggests.

According to recorded conversations cited by federal prosecutors, Mr. Masso was long familiar with cigarette smuggling. He told undercover investigators that he used to acquire cigarettes from a woman who bought them from Native American reservations and put bogus tax stamps on the cigarette boxes, a criminal complaint said.

He allegedly told the informant that he made $5,000 a week on the scheme and ruminated about again finding the woman and getting a tax stamp.

By May of this year, Mr. Masso and the group of officers and civilians he recruited allegedly had participated in the smuggling and sale of more than $600,000 worth of cigarettes, moving them from Virginia and New Jersey into the New York City area, authorities said. In one case, a group broke into box trucks in Virginia and stole the cigarettes, authorities said.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg's felon-riddled gun control advocacy group has begun lobbying in earnest against national conceal-carry reciprocity legislation that has been working its way through Congress. Members of the organization claim the legislation would undercut state's rights, which is pretty interesting considering how much Bloomberg himself had attempted to influence firearms legislation in Virginia and Arizona.

Canada's Ruling Conservative Party Moves to Scrap Nation's Costly Long Gun Registry

Loathed by Canadian hunters, farmers and sportsmen while coveted by gun control advocates in both Canada and the USA, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Cabinet introduced legislation that would scrap Canada's costly and controversial long gun registry once and for all.

"Our government believes that the requirement to register long-guns has needlessly and unfairly targeted law-abiding Canadians, specifically law-abiding firearms owners, as criminals for simply owning a long-gun," said MP Hoeppner [Representing the Portage-Lisgar, MB riding; southwest of Winnipeg] who introduced a similar private member's bill in the last Parliament that was narrowly defeated.

"Furthermore, these lawabiding firearms owners have been burdened with red tape that the long-gun registry has caused."

Ms. Hoeppner said the Conservatives have "examined" all the evidence and that she can now say confidently that the nearly $2-billion registry has been "completely ineffective" and "completely wasteful."

The legislation introduced Tuesday will not have an impact on registration requirements for restricted and prohibited firearms.

Gun owners will also still be required to pass a police background check, a firearms safety course and they will have to comply with all safe storage and transportation requirements.

The recently introduced bill would also require that data accumulated in the long-gun registry be deleted so that the registry could not be reconstituted in any way shape or form by a future government. Interestingly, after more than a decade of ignoring cost overruns from building and maintaining the actual registry, many supporters of the long gun registry are claiming that deletion of the registry's files on Canadian gun owners would be an onerous and costly proposition. The RCMP, which is responsible for the database, refused to make public any cost estimates regarding the registry's scrapping and deletion.

The Quebec government has already announced their opposition to both the closure of the registry and the mandated deletion of the files within. While the bill would allow for individual provinces to set up their own gun registry scheme, it was also made clear that the provinces should expect no federal funding for such endeavors.

The registry was introduced in 1995 and was finally operational by 2001 before Canadian gun owners were given a deadline of Jan 1, 2003 to individually register their non-restricted firearms. Failure to register guns or renew a Possession and Acquisition License (PAL) by a gun owner could draw a fine, possible jail time or confiscation.

In 2006, an Orilla, ON web consultant who worked on an earlier version of the registry's website said that the database could be easily hacked and the make, model and serial numbers of registered guns along with the home address and phone number of their owners could be accessed by just about anybody with a computer and about a half hour to spare.

Many gun owners also expressed concerns that additional restrictions or a prohibition of firearms with certain characteristics would be put in place under Chretien's government that would outlaw nearly overnight guns that they had legally obtained and owned for years.

While many top-level police officials in Eastern Canada initially supported the registry as a law-enforcement tool, others remained skeptical of its effectiveness.

Dismantling the registry was something Harper had campaigned on in previous elections, but lacked a Conservative majority in parliment to pull it off, although a measure to kill the registry was narrowly defeated in 2010. But in May of this year, Harper won re-election and his Conservative party trounced the opposition.

Since 1977, civilian firearms in Canada have fallen into three categories- non-restricted, restricted and prohibited. Non restricted guns can are usually long guns that can range from antique single-shot rifles and shotguns to semiautomatic or large caliber rifles and carbines. Firearms in the restricted category include all handguns as well as long-guns with certain features such as a flash suppressor or pistol grip (yet are functionally similar to many long guns in the non-restricted category).

Guns in the Prohibited category include belt-fed or fully automatic weapons or sawn off shotguns or rifles that had been grandfathered in prior to the revised guidelines in 1977.

Even though I'm neither Canadian or a Canadian gun owner, I personally will be glad to see this costly, onerous boondoggle go away. About 10 years ago, gun control advocates in the USA were approvingly citing this program as something that should be implemented here.

They didn't seem to mind the fact that this scheme would put law-abiding gun owners under even more scrutiny from law enforcement while gang members and criminals (on either side of the border) would continue to murder, rob and rape with their decidedly unregistered guns that they either stole or got on the black market. This quote from an Ottawa Citizen article about reaction to this week's development is pretty telling:

Some Canadians are alarmed that registered firearms users such as Styles have legal access to such weapons, which are considered "civilianized" models of modern military-assault rifles. Although these high-powered rifles are seldom used in crimes in Canada, many gun-control advocates want them banned in the name of public safety.

There you have it. Even though these purportedly fearsome weapons rarely show up at crime scenes on either side of the border, we're supposed to believe that these noble-minded busybodies are trying to protect us from a public safety threat that hardly even exists.

Others have been far more shrill and vindictive, not the least bit hesitant to lump hundreds of thousands of law abiding citizens with a misogynist sociopath who went on a killing spree at Montreal's École Polytechnique in December 1989. And then telling anybody who resents the comparison to 'get over themselves'. As the National Post's Chris Selley pointed out, these are hardly the ingredients for a successful charm offensive.

Outbursts like those from the Montreal Gazette's Janet Bagnall seem to do nothing but remind people that issues like gun control or gun registration were never about public safety to begin with, but rather utilizing the mechanisms of government to control a segment of the population those like her find distasteful.

Standing Up: A Tale of Two Riots and Steps Merchants Took To Protect Their Businesses

It seems almost inevitable that this month's rioting and looting in London would draw comparisons to the 1992 Los Angeles riots.



To be fair, there are some very valid comparisons to be made. One could argue that in both instances, an evaporating police presence and hypersensitivity to the perception of police brutality only served to fuel the rioters brazen aggression in the early going.



Before the first pane of glass was broken in Tottenham, it seemed as though enablers such as Ken Livingstone were prepared to make any number of excuses for the socioeconomic reasons leading up to the unrest while very conveniently ignoring the more immediate consequences of the rioters widespread looting, arson and assaults [one wonders if these same politicians would have such a forgiving outlook if it was their home or business that was picked clean by looters and firebombed- NANESB!].



Growing up in Western New England, I saw televised coverage of the LA riots unfolding pretty close to real time, including the brutal, unprovoked and near-fatal beating of truck driver Reginald Denny.



At the time, I couldn't help but wonder how much further things would spiral out of control. But in the second day of the LA riots, I saw something that was strangely reassuring. Abandoned by the LAPD and with the California National Guard still at least a day away from showing up, Korean merchants armed with pistols, rifles and shotguns began fortifying their shops and exchanging gunfire with approaching looters and roving gang members.



Not surprisingly, the gun-phobic Northeastern press was aghast and horrified at the armed Korean 'vigilantes' defending their livelihoods taking the law into their own hands. A contemporary account from the New York Times reads:

One of the most gripping and, increasingly, controversial television images of the violence was a scene of two Korean merchants firing pistols repeatedly from a military stance. The image seemed to speak of race war, and of vigilantes taking the law into their own hands.

I'll admit that I found it fascinating but not for the inflammatory and just plain wrong reasons the New York Times cited. Having grown up in a fairly liberal state, I was told that keeping a firearm for self-defense was a fallacy and if I did so, I was far more likely to injure or kill a member of the household than an intruder. Yet that particularly dubious statistic unravelled pretty quickly for all the world to see on live TV.



From the looks of it, there were two clear choices of what to do in such a dire situation. Find yourself at the mercy of unchecked thugs and criminals like Reginald Denny and others found themselves, or protect yourself, your business and your family by taking up arms like the Koreans did. Granted some businesses were lost to arson and looting, but by day two of the riots the armed merchants made it clear that rioters bound and determined to burn or loot their businesses would pay a heavy toll.





Fast forward nearly 20 years and on the other side of the Atlantic, the closest thing you have to the defiant Koreans fending off a murderous, rampaging mob are Turkish and Kurdish shopkeepers armed with baseball bats, knives and pool cues greeting the looters in England. Granted it had the desired effect this time around, but one has to wonder what the presence of even an old Lee-Enfield .303 rifle or over-under shotgun might've done to disperse the marauding crowd.



However, the United Kingdom has among the strictest gun control laws in the world- something many gun control advocates were hoping the USA would emulate some day. Yet since the UK's 1997 prohibition on private ownership of handguns, crime has only increased.



Even more problematic, without any debate or consultation the legal standard for what constitutes self-defense in England, hinging on a magistrate or prosecutor's definition of 'reasonable force' ex post facto. Yet many Britons feel that the people who have been engaging in a week-long spree of arson, assault and robbery will get off with a light sentence- if they're ever caught.



For all the complaints about America's supposedly lax gun laws, I'll take my chances with that versus a disarmed society where you're on your own once the police decide they can no longer protect you.

Arizona Gun Store Sues Feds Over ATF Order Requiring Tracking of Long Gun Sales in Border States

A Yuma, AZ gun shop is one of two plaintiffs suing the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms over a directive to report multiple sales of long guns at gun stores in border states.

The directive, which was passed last month, requires that stores report to the ATF purchases of two or more semiautomatic rifles greater than .22 caliber over the span of five days. The ATF Order comes amid Congressional hearing on the ATF's disatrous Operatation Fast & Furions in which senior ATF officials ordered field agents to allow guns purchased by suspected straw buyers in the USA to 'walk', i.e. be illegally exported to Mexico where they were sold to cartels and other criminal organizations before eventually turning up at crime scenes on both sides of the border- including the fatal December 2010 shooting of US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

The move comes after gun control advocates met with Obama administration and Justice department officials earlier this year. In a quote attributed to none other than Sarah Brady, President Obama assured prominent gun control adovcates in a meeting that he was working on gun control 'under the radar'- in other words, through regulatory means and executive orders instead of leaving the volatile and often unpopular issue to the Senate or House of Representatives prior to an election year.

While at first blush, the ATF directive may not seem particularly onerous, kindly consider that this is the agency whose senior officials allowed thousands of weapons to be illeaglly exported to Mexico where they were used by criminal gangs and cartels to kill scored Mexican civilians, public officials, police officers and soliders. Now THE VERY SAME AGENCY is responsible for enforcing this directive?

Even more galling, many retailers were repeatedly warning the ATF about suspicous customers during the Fast & Furious operation; the agency urged them to continue with the transactions nonetheless.

It's also worth contemplating how this month-old directive would prevent arms trafficking when according to diplomatic cables released via Wikileaks, the Mexican cartels are increasingly arming themselves with military-grade weaponry such as rocket launchers, grenades and plastic explosives from poorly-guarded military armories in Central America, not semiautomatic rifles or shotguns from US retailers.

27 Automatic Rifles Go Missing From California Army Base

Twenty six AK-74 Automatic rifles and a SVD Dragunov SVD sniper rifle were reportedly stolen from from a warehouse in Southern California's Fort Irwin this month.

ATF and military officials say that one of the missing rifles has been recovered and one arrest has been made, but the agency is offering a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to additional arrests and the recovery of the remaining weapons.

The weapons were reported missing on July 15th, although ATF and Army officials declined to clarify why it took 2 weeks for word of the missing weapons to be made public. Military and federal officials also declined to say whether or not the suspect in custody was military or civilian.

Both the AK-74 and Dragunov rifles and variants are common in former Soviet Bloc countries as well as the middle east. The Army base in the Mojave desert is home to the National Training Center, which has a dedicated OPFOR (Opposing Force) unit- the 11th Armoured Cavalry Regiment. Using weapons and equipment typically found elsewhere, the OPFOR is designed to mimic tactics that regular the Army units rotating through the NTC would encounter in combat zones elsewhere.

Two years ago, theives in northern California broke into locked parking lots at police stations in Contra Costa county and stole law enforcement-issue shotguns and AR-15 rifles from the California Highway Patrol and Contra Costa County Sheriff's Dept. patrol cars.

Fort Irwin is located between the Los Angeles area and Las Vegas. The nearest town would be Barstow, which is located about a 3 hour drive from the Mexican border. Numerous media reports claim that the Mexican cartels have a preference for the AK variant rifles, hinting at a likely destination for the pilfered weapons.

Nanny State Cheerleader Bloomberg Using Al Qaeda Video to Try and Sell More Gun Control in America

Obligatory gun show image

New York City Mayor (as well as anti-gun and anti-salt crusader) Micheal Bloomberg and an organization called Mayors Against Illegal Guns has launched a new video featuring quotations from a fugitive American member of Al Qaeda, claiming that terrorists will take advantage of a so-called 'gun show loophole'.

Frankly, I would be more concerned about firearms falling into the hands of thieves and convicted felons like Mayors Against Illegal Guns alumni Kwame Kilpatrick, Eddie Perez, Rod Blagojevich or Sheila Dixon.

An ominous television ad commissioned by Mayor Bloomberg will soon blanket the airwaves - warning that Al Qaeda could exploit the so-called "gunshow loophole."

This is a golden opportunity," said Al-Amriki. "America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms."

"You can go down to a gun show and come away with a fully-automatic assault rifle without a background check," Al-Amriki said on the terror tape. "So what are you waiting for?"

Bloomberg and his coalition - dubbed "Mayors Against Illegal Guns" - have long urged for the repeal of the gunshow loophole, which allows unlicensed sellers to peddle weapons without running a background check of the buyer.

"Criminals already know how to take advantage of gaps in our gun laws, and now Al Qaeda knows too," said Bloomberg about the new commercial.

"Weak gun laws aren't just a crime problem, they're a national security threat," Bloomberg said, "and this ad should be a wake-up call to Congress."

The Mayor's Against Illegal Guns ad makes reference to a video made by "American Al Qaeda" Adam Gadhan that was released earlier this month calling for "lone wolf" style attacks against high profile targets and institutions. Gadhan is thought to be in hiding on the Arabian peninsula, most likely Yemen.

He said: 'America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms.
'You can go down to a gun show at the local convention centre and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card.

Seriously- is it just me, or does it sound like Gadhan and Mayors Against Illegal Guns get their talking points from the exact same place? Perhaps this is an attempt by Bloomberg, other MAIG members and other gun control advocates to deflect attention away from the Congressional hearings into the ATF's Operation Fast & Furious with damning testimony from field agents who were ordered to allow weapons sold to straw purchasers in the USA to be illegally exported to Mexican drug cartels where they would be recovered from crime scenes on both sides of the border.

You'll have to excuse me if I call Mayor Bloomberg's counterterrorism expertise into question, given not only how the latest Mayors Against Illegal Guns video tidily overlaps with a number of long-standing gun control memes but his assessment of the attempted Times Square bombing last year. I find it very curious that the Mayor was reluctant to come right out and mention the possibility that a radical islamist was behind the botched Times Square bombing last year, but seems more than willing to invoke that same threat to try and sell the public on the notion of more gun control.

[Cross Posted at Pundit Press]

ATF Gunrinning Operation to Mexican Cartels- AKA 'Fast & Furious'- Comes Under Congressional Scrutiny This Week

Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry- slain in December 2010. Weapons from ATF's Operation Fast & Furious Were recovered at the crime scene along the Arizona/Mexico Border

Earlier this week, certain politicians and media outlets that support gun control were frantically out there trying to establish the 70% myth [i.e. the narrative that '70% of the weapons recovered in Mexico' come from America, which curiously is down from 90% in a few short months- NANESB!] just days ahead of the House Committee on oversight and Government Reform hearings into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms operation Fast & Furious.

As predicted, this is one of the downside of the Anthony Weiner fiasco- probably the most important Congressional hearings in three decades is usurped by the media circus surrounding the former Congressman from Queens. Outside of CBS News' Sheryl Atkinson, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms poorly-conceived Operation FAst & Furious didn't get alot of coverage in the mainstream media- let alone the Congressional inquiry.

The full committee hearings got underway at Capitol Hill on Wednesday with testimony from Brian Terry's family, 6 months to the day after the Border Patrol was shot and killed by Mexican smugglers armed with AK-variant rifles acquired by straw purchasers who were under surveillance as part of the ATF operation. Yet instead of interdicting the guns before they could be moved across the Mexican border, field agents were ordered the allow the guns to 'walk'. Two of the guns found at the scene of Terry's murder were part of thousands the ATF allegedly allowed gun traffickers to purchase.

The ATF called it letting "guns walk" -- a tactic they hoped would lead to them to drug kingpins. Agents who disagreed with the strategy blew the whistle.

"To walk a single gun is in my opinion an idiotic move," said ATF senior special agent Pete Forcelli. "We weren't giving guns to people who were hunting bear. We were giving guns to people who were killing other humans."

After Terry's murder, ATF quickly rounded up gun trafficking suspects they'd watched for a year. That's when the first reports of gunwalking began to surface. Asked if they were true at the time, ATF Phoenix chief Bill Newell told reporters "hell no" -- surprising those who worked for him.

"I was appalled, because it was a blatant lie," Forcelli said. Newell didn't respond to interview requests.

Also under attack: the Justice Department which oversees the ATF. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich says the agency is cooperating with Congress, but Rep. Darryl Issa says information is being withheld.

"You should be ashamed of yourself," Issa said at the hearing Wednesday holding up a blacked-out sheet of paper. "The pages go on like this forever. You've given us black paper instead of white paper. How dare you make an opening statement of 'cooperation.'"

Issa pressed Weich on who in Washington authorized the program -- and received no answer.

"There was serious profound disagreement about strategy -- but the common goal was to stop gun trafficking to Mexico," Weich said. "Some of the testimony provided today is of great concern. That is why the attorney general asked the inspector general to look into it."

When Brian Terry was gunned down last December, he'd already mailed Christmas gifts.

"The gifts that Brian had picked out with such thought and care began to arrive in the mail that same week," recalled Terry's cousin Robert Heyer, a Secret Service agent. "With each delivery, we felt the indescribable pain of Brian's death."

Terry's family wants someone to accept responsibility. The Department of Justice inspector general is investigating -- and any gunwalking that was taking place has been halted.

Perhaps to nobody's surprise, the Democrats on the Oversight Committee attempted to make the hearings about gun control rather than any sort of accountability from the Department of Justice or ATF. On top of apologizing to Assistant Attorney General Ronald Wiech after Committee Chair Darrel Issa (R- CA49) berated the Justice Department official for turning over pages of redacted documents in response to a subpoena, Representative Elijah Cummings (D- MD7) has proposed setting up a separate minority-led hearing with witnesses of his choosing. In doing so, the Democrats have demonstrated that they are deliberately ignoring the fact that even if the entire United States had strict gun control laws reminiscent of Chicago or Washington D.C. there's still the fact that it was a government agency that facilitated the acquisition of at least 2000 weapons to Mexican criminals. On top of that, US Diplomatic cables released by wikileaks indicate that the overwhelming number of weapons seized in Mexico- including explosives, grenades and anti-tank weapons- are actually procured by cartels from poorly-guarded military armouries in Central America before being smuggled into Mexico.

[I know I've asked this before, but it bears repeating- the Los Zetas organization is mostly comprised of former soldiers from the Mexican army, including Special Forces. Now, keeping in mind their connections to not only the black market, but the international arms market- why should I believe for a second that they are shopping for guns at Cabela's or Wal Mart?- NANESB!]

Weapons allowed across the border under Fast & Furious (or Rapido y Furiosa in the Mexican press) continue to turn up throughout Mexico- in April, Mexican police raided a house in Ciudad Juarez that turned up a half dozen Romanian-made AK-variant rifles that were traced back to the ill-conceived ATF operation [the raid also turned up dozens of grenades and three anti-aircraft machine guns, which probably weren't purchased from American gun stores- NANESB!] .

In May, Mexican soldiers came under fire and a Mexican Air Force helicopter was forced to make a crash landing during an anti-narcotics operation in Michoacan- weapons seized from there were also traced back to Fast & Furious.

Some of the preliminary findings of the Committee include:

● Agents expected to interdict weapons, yet were told to stand down and “just surveil.” Agents therefore did not act. They watched straw purchasers buy hundreds of weapons illegally and transfer those weapons to unknown third parties and stash houses.

● ATF agents complained about the strategy of allowing guns to walk in Operation Fast and Furious. Leadership ignored their concerns. Instead, supervisors told the agents to “get with the program” because senior ATF officials had sanctioned the operation.

● Agents knew that given the large numbers of weapons being trafficked to Mexico, tragic results were a near certainty.

● Operation Fast and Furious contributed to the increasing violence and deaths in Mexico. This result was regarded with giddy optimism by ATF supervisors hoping that guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico would provide the nexus to straw purchasers in Phoenix.

That last finding is sure to anger Mexico, which has so far been muted in its criticism. In a March 2010 memo, ATF says it allowed gun smugglers to buy 359 guns while 958 people died in Mexico the same month. Internally, the agency was “trumpeting up the violence that was occurring as a result of an ATF sanctioned program

A full PDF file of the Committee's reports can be found HERE

Prior to the hearings and Agent Terry's murder, a number of gun stores in Arizona, Texas and New Mexico went to the ATF with their concerns about suspicious transactions and concerns that the guns could be used against Border Patrol agents and other lawmen. However, the ATF assured dealers that the suspected straw purchasers and the guns purchased were being 'continually monitored'. More disturbingly is that the ATF reportedly didn't even bother contacting Mexican law enforcement (however compromised, corrupt or ineffective) or military to let them know that criminals were trafficking weapons from the USA to their jurisdiction- not even after Fast & Furious guns were recovered at crime scenes south of the border.

So in a nutshell, you had the supervisors in the ATF facilitating the sale of guns to Mexican cartels through proxies to prove that Mexican cartels were getting firearms from American stores.

[Cross posted on Pundit Press]