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I don’t see your angle here. Condemning the ATF for causing the deaths of mexican and parisian civilians and that border patrol guy, implies that letting people buy weapons is complicity in murder. You can either condemn the ATF, Obama, and the right to bear arms, or none of the above.
If you're a consistent 2A gunman, you have to, you know, bite the bullet. Obviously some of the legally sold guns are going to kill people. But guns don't kill people, and anyway protection against tyranny is worth it, and so on. So the ATF is perfectly innocent here.
Selling guns to murderous criminals is a bad idea, which is why we have made it illegal. The government directly facilitating the sale of large numbers of guns to murderous criminals, on purpose, is straightforwardly evil. The fact that they did so in secret, completely failed to achieve any of the purported law-enforcement objectives they offered as excuses after the fact, punished the whistleblower who revealed their activities, and rewarded and promoted the people who planned and executed their "failed" operation undermines any claim to legitimate purposes for their activities.
No. It is not only possible but is in fact trivial to distinguish between law-abiding citizens purchasing weapons for legitimate purposes, and arms traffickers buying weapons illegally and then transfer those weapons to murderous drug cartels. Such distinction is drawn in federal law, which was deliberately circumvented by the ATF. There is no justification for your conflation of legal and knowingly illegal arms sales.
This statement seems straightforwardly absurd, for reasons stated above.
No, I don't.
They were not legally sold. The gun dealers reported the purchases to the ATF, expecting them to arrest the purchasers. The ATF declined to do so, and in fact tried (successfully in some cases) to get them to sell more guns to the criminals, claiming it was part of a legitimate law enforcement operation. Given the results, I do not find that claim credible.
No, the ATF deliberately sold guns to the cartels, and claims to a legitimate law-enforcement reason for doing so are undermined by their complete failure to secure either the weapons or the criminals, and the subsequent rewarding of these failures by the agency higher-ups, the stonewalling of all subsequent attempts at investigation, and the punishment of whistleblowers. None of that looks like innocence to me.
What gun control law, that you support, makes this sale illegal?
You made the conspiratorial claim that this was some attempt to generate support for gun control legislation, but this is contradicted by their burying of the story, which is far more consistent with common incompetence. And as I said, pleading the ATF's complete innocence requires a pro-gun-rights perspective, which is obviously a position the obama administration would be reluctant to take.
...I think I misunderstood this the first time I read it. My instinctual response was "the laws that have already been passed regarding straw purchases by criminals or for illegal arms trafficking, which the government deliberately circumvented in this case." But perhaps I'm misunderstanding you? Are you asking what additional gun control restrictions need to be added to stop the Government from doing something its own laws say are illegal, simply because it's the agent that enforces those laws and can simply not enforce them when it wants to?
If that is your point, it seems like a bad one to me. What was done here was straightforwardly illegal. It happened anyway because the government directly and intentionally facilitated large-scale violation of the law, and then successfully covered it up to the point that they suffered no significant consequences. That is not a gun control problem, but rather a government control problem. No law aimed at preventing bad people from getting guns is going to work if the people tasked with enforcing it decide they would rather give the bad people guns instead.
I think they did it to push gun control because that seems to be the most straightforward motive available. Them burying the story does not contradict anything; they buried their direct facilitation of arm sales to the cartels, not arm sales to the cartels themselves, and they did it because once word got out they appear to have been more interested in insulating themselves from blowback than in deriving the hypothesized political advantage. And in fact, the political advantage was gained to a limited extent; arms trafficking from America to Mexico continues to be used as an argument for attacks on gun manufacturers and owners, as seen in the Mexican lawsuit against American firearms manufacturers that is proceeding in direct violation of black-letter federal law at this very moment.
I concede that they might be simply incompetent, and reflexively covered up evidence of their incompetence out of loyalty to the existing system. I note that there does not appear to be any available evidence that would distinguish such incompetence from active malice, and submit that if indeed incompetence is so severe as to be indistinguishable from malice, treating it as anything less than malice offers no general benefit to those suffering the consequences.
I do not see how pleading the ATF's complete innocence is even possible. The best you can argue is that every person involved except the whistleblower was so utterly incompetent and so determined to evade responsibility that the results of their actions are indistinguishable from criminal conspiracy. I do not see how a pro-gun-rights perspective enters the picture at all; the laws they deliberately violated are not a matter of significant contention in the gun control debate on either side, other than the general critique that the government routinely refuses to enforce them.
More generally, I do not think that Obama or the ATF finding it awkward to argue their innocence justifies them choosing instead to cover up either a complete clusterfuck failure resulting in numerous murders, or deliberate malice resulting in the same. I do not sympathize with them, and do not see why you would either.
Let’s say I support total marijuana legalization. Then I discover the DEA turned a blind eye to the sale of two tons of ganja, which was illegal. They said it was for a sting operation, but the drugs seemingly vanished in a puff of smoke. It would be hypocritical of me to accuse the DEA of knowingly ‘poisoning the youth’, destroying the economy and generally reefer madness roasting the shit out of the DEA for its inadequacy.
I would think extensive laws with the goal to prevent arms trafficking and straw purchases would... infringe. But you're telling me you support those laws unequivocally ? Want them strengthened?
All they did was not interfere in a transaction, I don't find it all that reprehensible, they should do that more often.
Sure. But the difference here is that the DEA is allowing what you actually want.
Suppose that you support total marijuana legalization, but believe that harder drugs like, say, PCP should remain illegal. Suppose the DEA deliberately turned a blind eye to the sale of two tons of PCP-laced marijuana, which was then distributed as normal marijuana and resulted in numerous high-profile deaths and injuries, which were in turn used to argue for greater restrictions on "normal" marijuana. It seems to me that you would be well within your rights to complain, especially if it seemed that the DEA did this on purpose and you suspect they did so explicitly to fuck your interests.
If you wish the sale of firearms to be entirely unrestricted, you are free to argue for your position. I am free to disagree with you, as are most gun owners and the rest of the gun culture. Total removal of all restrictions on firearms sale and ownership is a level of survival we are willing to accept, but it is neither our preference nor a desirable state. Violent criminals, and especially organized violent criminals, should be denied arms to the extent that doing so does not significantly compromise the rights of the law-abiding.
I disagree that "all they did was not interfere with a transaction". They failed to interfere with one of the absolute worst forms of transaction possible, and they made a largely successful effort to keep their failure to interfere secret, when the obvious disasters resulting would and did offer them a clear and entirely illegitimate political advantage. To the extent that you accept such behavior, you make it impossible to fight the principle-agent problem at the heart of the political corruption of law-enforcement.
As I and others have pointed out repeatedly, such laws have existed for decades without complaint from the gun culture. I do in fact support those laws unequivocally, to the exact extent that they are enforced in good faith. I would not agree with my friend being prosecuted for buying me a firearm as a present, as it is sometimes erroneously claimed that the laws restrict, and which a corrupt enforcement agency might try to prosecute for illegitimate reasons.
Sure, one could argue that this "infringes" the right to keep and bear arms. Society is a compromise, and I am willing to accept a level of infringement when the cost is small and the benefits large and obvious. I am willing to be a maximalist, but I prefer compromise, so long as that "compromise" does not involve me and mine getting assfucked without lube or consent by unaccountable and deeply corrupt government and social interests who hate us with a passion. Belief that such compromises are possible continues to drop asymptotically toward zero, but the APIT rounds have not hit the cooling jacket yet; there is still time to hope for a better future, and prepare for the future that seems more likely.
I certainly do not want them strengthened. The problem is that the laws we already have are not being enforced, and that is not a problem that strengthening those laws could plausibly fix. I cannot begin to imagine an argument for why the government refusing to appropriately enforce existing laws means we should pass more laws, thereby granting them more power. I would be happy to see strengthened laws and additional laws aimed at the government agents themselves, to reduce their ability to cover up abuses of this sort and to punish them more severely if they occur. That would seem far more sensible that responding to a refusal to enforce gun control laws by passing more gun control laws.
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Is there some rule that says the government can break it's own laws, as long as there are people who don't support the laws? If anything it's the opposite, people in power can either repeal the laws in question, if they think they're bad laws and don't want to be subject to them, or they should be punished for breaking them.
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"It's OK to sell duct tape, knives, ropes, and large black plastic bags" does not imply "It's OK to sell duct tape, knives, ropes, and large black plastic bags to a guy you know works for a serial killer"
Outlawing sting operations does not seem to be a good idea.
Controlling police to prevent incompetent sting operations seems a good idea (and in general having some good handle over police).
No sting operation was actually executed. No actionable evidence was gathered, no convictions were secured. Both the weapons and the criminals trafficking them were allowed to escape. The federal agent who blew the whistle on the fuckup was very obviously punished for doing so. The agents who failed to secure either the weapons or the criminals were rewarded and promoted. The Attorney General successfully stonewalled congress when it attempted an investigation.
I do not think that sequence of events is fairly described as a "sting operation", nor do I think its failure can be reasonably ascribed to "incompetence". Given the politically-charged nature of the incident, given the complete lack of consequences for those responsible, and given how those responsible appear to have been deliberately protected by their superiors and by the Obama administration itself, and given that the many remaining unknowns are unknown only because the Obama administration fought successfully and at great length to conceal them, I do not think it prudent to give either the agents involved or the administration directing them the benefit of the doubt.
You seem to really underestimate just how incredibly incompetent people can be and overestimate how often complex black flag operations are executed in real life.
Or maybe I overestimate how many things are bungled due to incompetence and underestimate presence of highly complex nefarious plots.
(may be related to fact that in my area I seen amazing examples of extreme stupidity, bad planning, incompetence, denial of reality - and have seen accusations of nefarious plots mismatching reality. I was even personally accused of running some complex conspiracy few times, that has not existed - unless I am some case of bizarre reverse schizophrenia.)
How this proves anything? I am pretty sure that if institution is rotten then they would do the same in case of conspiracy and out of scale fuckup.
Oh and note that the same claim without
would probably not trigger such nitpicking and disbelief from my side. Probably focusing on provable and mostly covered up part would be more effective, at least in my case.
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So you want morality checks, employment histories and doctor’s referrals on all purchases of duct tape? Unless they’ve been proven guilty, they’re free citizens allowed to buy goods for any suspected killer they choose.
No. I want federal agents to enforce the law against known criminals. No morality checks or employment histories or doctor's referrals were needed in these cases; the gun dealers reported the purchasers to federal authorities on their own initiative, because they correctly recognized illegal purchases.
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