ATF Proposals On Guns
BY Herschel Smith
7 years, 10 months ago
“As a long term bureaucrat, this white paper reads as an application for the ATF director spot,” Weingarten surmises. “The paper fairly screams: I am willing to work with you, and I know how to take direction.”
That tracks with opinions I’ve received from insider and industry sources. It also works to mitigate the threat to the Bureau of having its functions spun off to different agencies.
I must admit to being skeptical of the motivation myself. Government employees don’t usually work to undermine the scope of their authority.
I’ll also comment on a point David makes about a FOIA request in which he was involved. Perhaps the FOIA request caught them with their pants down and forces them to consider their failures as an organization.
My experience has been that any entity that thinks it will be embarrassed by what it divulges in response to a FOIA will ignore the FOIA. If you have massive legal assets like Judicial Watch, you typically can get what you want, albeit with some effort. But for me, this usually goes badly. The FOIA framework has no teeth because little people like me have no ability to force them to obey the law.
At any rate, the white paper reads like a job application. Perhaps it is. I don’t blame him. I blame the executive branch of the government for allowing the ATF to get this badly out of control, I blame the Senate for the NFA and GCA, and I blame the people of the U.S. for putting communists in place who would promulgate this kind of legal framework to begin with.
What a sorry situation.
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