Tracking the gun-runners

[jpak]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-guns-20110228,0,28852.story

Violence along the U.S.-Mexico border continues to spiral upward, with all-too-frequent reports of bullet-ridden bodies turning up on street corners, in parks, on deserted highways, even at quinceaneras.

A complex combination of drugs, corruption and poverty may be behind the bloodletting. But the source of the weapons used to kill is easily identified: The U.S. accounts for an estimated 85% of guns seized by Mexican authorities, according to a 2009 Government Accountability Office report.

For years, U.S. officials have been promising to clamp down on gun-runners who supply drug cartels and human smugglers. Now, the Obama administration has the opportunity to make good on that pledge, by granting a request by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to track bulk sales of semiautomatic long guns. The new rule would require the 8,500 licensed gun shops in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas to report to the agency any sale of two or more rifles of greater than .22 caliber to the same person over five days.

It's a sensible and, if anything, too-modest plan that could provide valuable tips to ATF agents and help reduce violence on both sides of the border. President Obama should not only approve it, he should expand it to apply to all gun sellers nationwide. Limiting the rule to the four border states will only push the illicit trade into the nearest state where smugglers can load up on AK-47-style assault weapons.

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[Ken_Fish]

1. "too-modest" sorry, not bold enough for the times. Maybe we should let the AFT arm

them by dumping thousands of guns to "trace" (or bump their stats). Not gonna happen.

Please be sure to take the POTUS's silence on this issue as one more sign this issue is no longer relevant to the platform.

AK-47 "style" the Martha Stewart treatment for your com block rifle.. That's funny.

[DrDan]

2. NRA pulling the puppet strings once again

". . . the House voted 277 to 149 to block the ATF's request by barring the use of federal funds.

[lawodevolution]

3. You think if you keep repeating the lies they will stick

[Atypical Liberal]

4. Tracking bulk sales.

I don't really have a problem with tracking bulk sales of firearms.

If someone buys 5 or more civilian AK-47s at one go, I think this might be worthy of some scrutiny. How many people legitimately do this kind of thing? Heck, if the same person applies for a NICS check 5 times in a month, I think that might be worthy of some scrutiny.

This sort of thing would be trivial for the NICS system to check. If the same name is presented for processing 5 or more times in a month, that triggers some kind of scrutiny.


That said, the BATFE has recently been caught with its pants down. They allowed firearm sales to known gun traffickers, even when the gun dealer warned them that they thought it was a bad sale. The BATFE instructed them to let the sales go through.

Even if you assume the best intentions, they were allowing firearms to be sold to traffickers in the hopes that it would help them trace them through various connections. But if you assume the worst intentions, they were intentionally allowing illegal firearm sales to pad their numbers for some nefarious purpose. ATF agents have alleged just this - that it was all about padding statistics for the BATFE to help justify their existence.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7357550n