More Federal Overreaching from ATF

By Jeff Knox

Ever since the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA’68), established a licensing system for gun dealers, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has been loading gun dealers down with ever-increasing responsibilities for record keeping, reporting, and, to a growing degree, psychic precognition.  For years ATF has run sting operations against dealers trying to catch them selling guns to someone that they “should have known” was acting as a straw buyer.  A straw buyer is someone who illegally purchases a gun for someone who presumably couldn’t buy the gun for themselves.  Federal law forbids the sale of firearms to any “prohibited person,” including convicted felons, anyone convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence, illegal aliens, anyone involuntarily committed for mental illness, and anyone who is an “unlawful user of, or addicted to, any controlled substance.”  

In late September, the ATF sent an “Open Letter” to all Federal Firearms Licensed dealers (FFLs) advising them that anyone licensed by their state to legally (in the state’s eyes) use marijuana for medicinal purposes is an unlawful user of a controlled substance under federal law, and therefore prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms.  Even if the person has never used marijuana, the fact that they are licensed by the state to do so makes them a prohibited person according to the ATF.

Continue reading State v. Federal – Rights War →

* Exclusive *

Meet the New Boss

Don’t be fooled again.

   By Jeff Knox

Was the new Acting Director of ATF involved at the inception of the criminal gunwalking scandal known as Operation Fast & Furious?

The appointment of B. Todd Jones as Acting Head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) hasn’t caused much of a ripple – in the media or in the ATF.  By most accounts Jones is a stand-up guy, ex-Marine, and in a refreshing change of pace, apparently not known for ignominious bouts of bad judgment.  But who your friends are generally says a lot about you and Todd Jones is a long-time friend and confidant of his boss, Eric Holder.  That’s got some gun owners uneasy and asking for more information about the new chief gun control enforcer. 

While Jones hasn’t publicly demonstrated the anti-gun bias of Holder or Obama’s pick for a permanent ATF Director, Andrew Traver, there are legitimate reasons for concern.  Along with Jones’ close associations with Holder – going all the way back to the Reno Justice Dept., when Holder was in charge of the official DOJ whitewash of the Waco fiasco – there is also strong evidence that Jones was actually involved in Operation Fast & Furious from the very beginning.

Researchers at The Firearms Coalition, the grass roots rights organization my father founded in 1984, have uncovered what appears to be a redacted reference to B. Todd Jones in attendance at the first meeting of Eric Holder’s “Southwest Border Strategy Group.”  This group included people at the highest level of ATF, DOJ, FBI, and other agencies, including virtually all the people implicated in F&F to date.  This organizational meeting is likely where Operation Fast and Furious was conceived.

Continue reading New ATF Boss →

Lies, Damn Lies, and the Bradys…

By Jeff Knox

The Brady Center against Guns (formerly Handgun Control, Inc.) is out with a new report on the firearms industry and as is typical, the authorized journalists of the “mainstream media” are lapping up the Brady swill and regurgitating it back out with no investigation or critical analysis as if it were written in stone by the almighty himself.

The fact is that the Brady “report” is actually little more than wild assumptions and unfounded fear mongering based on some raw numbers provided by ATF to members of the firearms industry. What those numbers indicate is that an undisclosed number of unidentified manufacturers have had some problems keeping track of all of the frames and receivers they make, but that there has been marked improvement over the last two years. In all, according to the ATF, some 18,000 serial numbers were unaccounted for during factory inspections over the past two and a half years.

While that seems high to those unfamiliar with large-scale firearms production, it actually represents a remarkable low percentage of firearms produced and such “lost” guns are almost always a simple matter of paperwork or accounting errors. While there is occasional pilfering of parts by factory employees, this is extremely rare and is usually quickly detected. The vast majority of these “lost” guns never left the factory; they were frames or receivers which failed some quality control inspection and were recycled. Many of the missing guns simply never existed. Automated equipment stamps serial numbers and generates a record, but sometimes numbers get skipped, or there is a gap in the line resulting in a number being stamped into thin air. If such errors are not immediately detected by an equipment operator, the imaginary gun goes into the system and is later unaccounted for.

Continue reading Brady Distortions →

Guitars, Guns, and Federal Excesses

On August 24, 2011, federal agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service raided offices and production facilities of the Gibson Guitar company.  They sent workers home and confiscated several pallets of wood along with computer files and numerous guitars (amounting to about $2 million in lost production and property).  This was the second raid on Gibson in as many years over questions about some of the wood the legendary guitar makers use in their products.  The timing of the latest raid is convenient for the government as they are currently trying to convince a federal judge to indefinitely delay a lawsuit from Gibson demanding the return of some half-million dollars worth of ebony wood seized by federal agents back in 2009.  No charges have ever been filed against the company regarding that raid, but the government has continued to refuse to return the seized wood which they suspected might have been illegally harvested in Madagascar.

The object of the August 24 raid appears to have been wood imported from India.  Gibson says that they have been extra careful to document all of the wood they import since the 2009 federal assault and that the particular wood in question was acquired from a supplier certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, an environmental organization set up to protect endangered trees by identifying legally harvested wood and closing markets to illegally cut products.  The particular wood in question was purchased and imported from India with an extensive paper-trail from the Indian government and the US Customs Service.  According to Gibson, the Fish and Wildlife Service is claiming that the wood violates an Indian requirement that wood exported from the country must be processed to a certain degree by Indian craftsmen prior to export.  Gibson says this requirement was either met or waived by the Indian government as demonstrated by India’s export authorizations.  The Indian government did not sanction or participate in the August raid.  Gibson executives say they are being unjustly bullied by the feds.

Continue reading GunsnGuitars →

No More Bonzer Blokes

Rugged Individualism Replaced by Australia’s Nanny State

I’ve long been fascinated by Australia and its people.  A visit to that country has been high on my bucket list since I was just a kid, but more and more as I read about present-day Australia I am disappointed and saddened.  It seems that the days of rugged individualism and self-determination are gone from the land down under and the heroic characters of the past like Ned Kelly and Banjo Patterson have faded into the realm of myth and fairytales.  It wasn’t so long ago that the reputation of Australia included the belief that one Australian could easily – and happily – pommel any two men from any other country – more if she put down her baby.  And Australian men had an even hardier reputation.

Sadly that’s no longer the case as Australia has apparently devolved into a namby-pamby society of effete urbanites, hen-pecked by anglophilic nannies and socialist, world-citizen politicians who revel in Australia’s rugged history while criminalizing and quashing any hint of such thought or action in present day. 

Continue reading Bonzer Blokes →

Left-Leaning Intelligentsia Discovers the “The Secret History of Guns”

With its publication of “The Secret History of Guns,” The Atlantic, that venerable highbrow monthly, it appears that the northeastern establishment has uncovered the dark “secret” of gun control – that gun control laws exist not to control guns, but people – in particular, Black people. Congratulations to the wine and brie crowd for making that discovery. It’s a point my father, gun writer and pro-rights lobbyist Neal Knox, was making forty years ago. Friend Clayton Cramer, published his excellent “Racist Roots of Gun Control” in 1993, and the article was picked up in the Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy in 1995. Nonetheless, since it’s now in The Atlantic, it’s accepted thought inside the establishment.

Adapted from a recently-released book, Gunfight by UCLA constitutional law professor Adam Winkler, “The Secret History of Guns” opens with the 1967 armed march by Black Panthers on the California state capitol building. Professor Winkler quite accurately says that incident “launched the modern gun-rights movement.” Winkler then moves through a compact history of gun rights in America starting with the Second Amendment, which he calls “maddeningly ambiguous,” citing a conflict between the meaning of “well-regulated,” and “the right of the People.” Just an aside, a student of language might find less ambiguity by applying a simple analysis to the text, identifying the subject, verb, object and modifiers. Nonetheless, we’ll let it pass; the statement can be viewed as either a sop to the anti-rights side of the issue, or an effort by Winkler to establish his neutrality. The rest of the article delves into the history of gun control from the angle of race and aligns quite closely to arguments we in the pro-rights side have been making for years.

Continue reading Left Eye Blind →

Questioning “No Questions Asked” Are Gun-Surrender Gimmicks Legal

For decades we’ve heard about gun turn-ins – “Gun Buy-Back” programs sponsored by churches, civic groups, and various other misinformed do-gooder organizations.

The very name – buy-back – implies that guns belong not to individuals, but to the government, or at least to the people who don’t like guns.

The programs have the stated purpose of “getting guns off the street,” which seems to give operators a pass from further scrutiny, even as they offer a tangible good such as a grocery store coupon or gift card in return for a gun, “no questions asked,” much like any other fencing operation.

Continue reading No Questions Asked →

Repeal False Gun Free School Zone Act

Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) has introduced a bill (HR-2613) to repeal the federal Gun Free School Zone Act. While many in the general public and the gun prohibition community will balk and ask questions like, “What does anyone need with a gun at a school,” knowledgeable rights supporters are wondering why it has taken so long.

The Gun Free School Zone Act, or GFSZA for short, was originally passed by Congress back in 1990, but in 1995 the Supreme Court voided the law, ruling it (quite correctly) to be an unconstitutional overreach of federal power. Congress quickly passed a revised version of the act which included the stipulation that the firearm had, “moved in or that otherwise affects interstate or foreign commerce.” With this addition Congress supposedly provided constitutional authority for their actions and, while the Supreme Court has not revisited the issue, several Appeals Courts have upheld convictions under the new language.

The GFSZA is one of those feel-good laws that so often pass in the wake of a tragedy – the Stockton, California schoolyard shooting, in this case – which do nothing to address the problem, but which leave a wake of unintended consequences. The GFSZA did nothing to prevent the rash of school shootings that plagued the nation in the 1990s.

Continue reading Repeal Gun Free School Zone Act →

Protecting the Second Amendment is Not Enough

               At last count, a full half of the US Senate had signed onto a July letter to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton declaring their opposition to any United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) which includes infringement on US citizens’ rights to possess firearms. While I applaud this effort, I have to say that I’m disappointed in the senators’ narrow focus in the letter. Protecting the Second Amendment and warning Obama and Clinton not to agree to any treaty which might infringe on the rights of Americans ignores what the UN is doing to citizens of other countries. The right to arms is not just an American right, it is a basic human right extrapolated from the right to self-defense. Human beings have an individual right to defend themselves and their families, and citizens – regardless of what country – have a moral obligation to also defend others who are unable to defend themselves.

If the UN were forwarding a plan to limit voting to males only or to institute broad government controls over the press, our senators would not stop at our constitution and our borders in their denunciation of the plans. Instead they would expound upon the importance of universal suffrage and the necessity of a free press – for all people everywhere. They would not just “strongly encourage” the administration to “uphold our country’s constitutional protections,” they would demand that the administration reject and actively oppose any treaty which could be in any way construed to support such restrictions on basic rights in any nation.

Continue reading Protect the Second Amendment →

Antis: Wisconsin Too Drunk for Concealed Carry

              Dire predictions were once again flowing from Americas Dairyland as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker prepared to sign a bill providing for some state-approved citizens to carry concealed firearms. An Associated Press story in last Sunday’s Chicago Tribune breathlessly warned that “city officials and business owners around the state will only have four months to figure out how to comply with the law while also keeping citizens and customers safe.” And, using language straight from the Brady/Violence Policy playbook, that “law enforcement agencies will need to prepare for the possibility of more people carrying hidden guns in public.” The article does go on to include some of the arguments of supporters of the bill, but the clear intent of the article is to gin up fear and doubt among citizens, neighbors, and business owners.

The blood-in-the-streets mantra, which has been repeated each time any state or municipality has introduced or passed concealed carry laws or expanded recognition of firearms rights, seems to finally be losing its steam, though as Wisconsin is the 49^th state to enact some form of concealed carry and the predictions of bedlam have never once come true. Even the one law enforcement official the AP could find to comment against the new law, Grant County Sheriff Keith Govier, admitted that his peers in other states had told him that while they had expected additional problems when concealed carry laws were passed in their states, such problems had never materialized. Still, Grovier expressed concern for the safety of officers making late night traffic stops or responding to domestic violence incidents where an “angry suspect has quick access to the gun,” but he then noted that most of the armed citizens they might encounter would be hunters or business owners who are unlikely to represent a threat.

Continue reading Drunk Wisconsins? →