re: #49 It’s a cookbook!

Had anyone but the government sold those guns these people would be screaming at us to respect their rights.

The Feds never sold any guns, nor did they pose as gun sellers or buyers.

The error on the part of the ATF was to encourage private sellers who reported concerns about some buyers to continue to sell them guns with no questions asked of them. These “straw buyers” who were buying large quantities of semi-automatic tactical (assault weapons/rifles is now a four letter word after the expired ban) rifles like AK-47 variants and paying “with paper bags full of cash” were of course only buying them to resell them across the border at a profit.

The ATF collected all the information on these sales, the buyers I.D. along with the serial numbers of the guns in the hopes of tracking them and identifying the “real” purchasers and finding out the methods used to get them across the border in quantity.

The “glitch” came when after they had collected quite a lot of data on these “straw buyers” and presented it to the U.S. Attorneys office the Attorneys office told them to go fly a kite more or less. No laws had been broken in their opinion, or at least not blatantly enough to get a conviction in a very pro-gun state like Arizona.

Which of course begs the question of what the ATF could have possibly done to stop these sales in the first place. Sure some of the licensed sellers probably would not have continued to make sales to people they thought suspicious without the ATF telling them it was ok, but other dealers certainly would have picked up the slack anyway.

If you are not a felon and have no public record of mental disease you can buy as many rifles as you want in this country and no one can stop you. At best the ATF could have “advised” the dealers not to sell to these people and then gone and interviewed them to try to scare them into leaving the business “since we know what you are doing.”

However if the dealers wanted to keep selling and the buyers wanted to keep buying there is not one damn thing the ATF could have done about it. Not without the ability to show criminal intent, something that has to be eventually determined in court, and that is completely impossible while the U.S. Attorneys office refuses to even indict any of them.