Exposing the Guns to Mexico Lie

Earlier this year, former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) Attaché to Mexico (basically their Bureau Chief in that country), Darren Gil, told reporters and congressional investigators that he only learned about the gunwalking scandal known as Operation Fast & Furious, after he had retired and the operation began making news in the blogosphere and the press.  But he said that he and his team in Mexico detected the surge in guns that Fast & Furious generated as early as the latter part of 2009 – within weeks of the initiation of the gunwalking scheme.  Gil reported that the sudden spike in crime guns being traced back to the Phoenix, AZ area caused immediate concern and that he quickly reported the analysis to his superiors and the Phoenix ATF office, but that the problem continued to grow, causing tension between his office and his Mexican law enforcement counterparts.  When he demanded to know why the investigation, into what was obviously a major gun trafficking operation, was not yielding results and staunching the flow, he was told that the investigation was ongoing and that he was to leave it alone – and not to share his analysis with Mexican authorities.

While Agent Gil’s statements have been rightly recognized as a scathing indictment of the Fast & Furious operation and the people directing it, a very important aspect of his account has been largely overlooked — or studiously ignored: If the flow of guns from Fast & Furious was clearly discernible by Gil and his analysts in late 2009, at the very beginning of the gunwalking operation, then the reports of an “Iron River” of guns flowing from US gun dealers to Mexican drug cartels is obviously a lie.

Continue reading More Guns Lies →

Run up to 2012 Elections Means More Gun Noise

Change flash and bang for Bullseyes by pushing for action

Elections are in the air and while the presidential contenders and the media focus on jobs and the economy as election issues, members of Congress and state legislators know that certain issues can wake up voters and make a huge difference come Election Day.  Gun control and firearm owner rights are among those voter-motivating issues and the push for gun points is well underway. 

Politicians and their campaign strategists do their best to fire up GunVoters and earn their support by cosponsoring pro-rights legislation, holding hearings, and generating committee and floor activity that catches the attention of the gun magazines and rights reporters like me.  To a large degree though, the biannual congressional gun show is exactly that:  a show.  As my late father, Neal Knox was fond of pointing out, most members of Congress are interested in the gun issue only as a political issue.  Few are interested in actually passing serious pro-rights legislation; their main interest is to bolster their reelection credentials.  For them and their campaign strategists, the name of the game is lots of show with, little go.  Their objective is to activate the special interests with a show of activity, but to avoid actually doing much of anything that might be turned against them later.  Being professional politicians and political hacks, even those who claim to support gun rights tend to be somewhat elitist in their attitudes towards the hoi polloi and look at gun owners with almost as much mistrust and distaste as do their anti-gun colleagues. 

Currently there are several pro-rights initiatives active in Congress and the difference between show and go on these bills could be your informed email.  They want to bluster and offer friendly platitudes, but you can demand that they take action.  If you’re an NRA member, you can also lobby NRA to push harder for votes – even if they don’t think they can win or if it isn’t what their “friends” in Congress want.  Your emails, letters, and phone calls can have an impact.  Demand that we either get our good bills passed or have a clear record of whom to hold responsible.

Continue reading 2012 Elections →

Guns for Our Grandchildren

The future of the shooting sports is brighter than ever

Only a few years ago, many in the shooting world fretted about the future of our sports, pointing to the preponderance of grey and missing hair on the firing lines of shooting ranges and in the hunting fields. Without  younger shooters, the older shooters worried, the sports would simply dry up.  Fewer shooters and hunters would also mean fewer gun owners and activists to stand against encroaching gun laws and fewer buyers of firearms and hunting equipment to fund wildlife and habitat conservation efforts. 

Rather than stand by and allow the shooting sports to die by attrition, shooting groups and the firearms and hunting equipment industries, along with millions of  individual shooters began actively working to make shooting more accessible to younger generations.  Hunters lobbied for, and got, special mentoring licenses and game permits to allow novice hunters better and safer access to game fields.  Clubs and industry groups created new training and competition programs for young people.  Newer, more exciting, action-shooting games began surpassing traditional, more staid shooting disciplines.  An unintended consequence of three wars in the past 20 years is a boon to the shooting sports as it has provided hundreds of thousands of young people with firearms training and sparked enduring interest in guns, shooting, and hunting in many of them. 

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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.

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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 →