ATF is in the gun smuggling business??

And here I thought they were supposed to be preventing crime or something like that. Mike Vanderboegh reports:

Official ATF documents and sources in both Arizona and Washington D.C. confirm that in at least two instances in 2010, agents of the United States government purchased Kalashnikov-pattern semi-automatic pistols directly from licensed federal firearms dealers with taxpayer money and delivered those weapons directly into the hands of cartel smugglers.

I guess I was wrong.

So there is evidence that those in our government facilitated the smuggling of guns into a criminal gang and now what are they going to do about it?

My guess is continue to circle the wagons.

Labor Day Reprise

As I so often do on Labor Day, I celebrate by working. This year was spent on Camp Stranded as we finished the roof on the shed.

I understand this begs the question of, "What the hell have you been wasting your time on?" And, "You should have been finished with that by now, you lazy bum."

Both valid comments and with spending the last several weeks catching up on work, fighting with getting the right materials from a "local" big box store (since the closure of our home-town lumber yard) and saving my wife's dog from the vet, I've been interrupted a few times.

Oh, and then the adventure that started out with replacing a wax ring on the toilet that turned into replumbing my upstairs bathroom. Next is a new floor...

But now I have a roof over the newly acquired Farmall H:

Camp Stranded Shelter #1 (built without union labor)

Since my mower deal fell through as I was looking for a tractor (kind of a cart-before-the-horse kind of thing, which to get first), I sat on upon my new metal roof and looked upon an impressive field of horse weeds, burdock and foxtails and questioned my purchase of 20 acres of work.

But I also contemplated upon a family with each member contributing effort during our first construction of an amateur shelter. Yeah, it took longer than I wanted, but the next one will be better and built with experienced team effort. And I watched my wife take her first tour of the treeline without me but with her faithful dog at her side. The same dog we nearly put down because the vet gave up on him a few weeks ago.

As we were screwing the roof down, the turkey buzzards glided just 80-100 feet overhead and later hummingbirds came to visit as we took a break. The hummingbirds were a welcomed surprise and we will definitely encourage their return. Blue herons stopped at the pond for a brief rest before flying southeast of us as they spread their wings just above the mature trees in the corner. All this reminds me of the variety of nature in Iowa as we paused to watch the menagerie.

As the last screw on the last metal sheet was turned only half-way, my battery died on the drill. Perhaps a metaphor of the life of a short balding fellow from Iowa (he just never quite gets the job done). But a ratchet wrench works in a pitch, as I was taught to be prepared, bring a backup and always cover your ass.

And there were others at work yesterday as David Codrea reported of another ATF gunrunning fiasco, this time in Indiana. It makes me wonder why we even have the NICS check at all. If it wasn't for David and Mike Vanderboegh I wonder if we would have heard about the gunwalking into Mexico by the ATF.

To little Jimmy Hoffa Junior and to Joe Biden who opened their mouths yesterday, there are more of us than there are of you... This country was built by hard-working Americans, free and unionized, and not by loud-mouthed freeloaders who grabbed power for their own benefit. I'd bet that neither of these two bums ever worked a day in their lives. Calluses are for regular folk.

So Jimmy and Joe, shut the $%@#$% up. This SOB has to get back to work.

Long gun reporting starts in the SW

And will soon come to a neighborhood gun dealer near you.

David Codrea: DoJ proceeds with long gun reporting requirement

Dave Workman: BREAKING: DoJ announces gun reporting requirements; Issa, Grassley respond

Our Senator Grassley had this to say:

“We’ve learned from our investigation of Fast and Furious that reporting multiple long gun sales would do nothing to stop the flow of firearms to known straw purchasers because many Federal Firearms Dealers are already voluntarily reporting suspicious transactions. In fact, in just the documents we’ve obtained, we are aware of 150 multiple long guns sales associated with the ATF’s Fast and Furious case, and despite the fact that nearly all of these sales were reported in real time by cooperating gun dealers, the ATF watched the guns be transported from known straw purchasers to third parties and then let the guns walk away, often across the border. This makes it pretty clear that the problem isn’t lack of burdensome reporting requirements. The administration’s continued overreach with regulations continues, and is a distraction from its reckless policy to allow guns to walk into Mexico.”

Grassley has been using the term "walked" more often lately and I heard this from him in an interview on WHO radio last week. "Gunwalker" is the term David Codrea came up with to describe these weapons that the ATF allowed to go into Mexico and other countries in Central America.

Now we are hearing of reports that the Tampa and Houston ATF offices followed the lead of the Phoenix ATF office and allowed now up to 5000 guns out of the country.

Grassley demands answers on guns to Mexico

WASHINGTON – In a letter to the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Senator Chuck Grassley pressed for additional details about the bureau’s knowledge of the straw purchasers of the guns involved in the killing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata.


Today’s letter follows a March 4 letter where Grassley cited press reports and a Justice Department press release that raised the prospect that the ATF strategy of allowing straw purchasers to continue to operate in hopes of making bigger cases may have contributed to the shooting of Zapata. The Justice Department responded to Grassley’s letter on behalf of the ATF but refused to provide any substantive information, citing an investigation by the department’s inspector general.

Read more and the letters from Senator Grassley at: Grassley Concerned that ATF’S Risky Strategy of Letting Guns Walk May Have Been Used Beyond Fast and Furious

H/T to Mike Vanderboegh at Sipsey Street Irregulars

Sen Grassley, ATF and the Mexico guns

The efforts of David Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh to proclaim what they call "Project Gunwalker" has resulted in our Senator Chuck Grassley firing off letters asking for explanations from the ATF. (You can read the letters at Sipsey Street.)

In what appears to be straw purchases that were directly approved by the ATF, firearms were transported to Mexico. Some of the weapons were then used by criminal thugs in a shootout with Border Patrol agents leaving one killed.

David and Mike's (and others') effort to get the Judicial committee members interested in the ATF actions as a rogue agency has resulted in Sen Grassley taking a hard look at what's going on.

A sanitized version:

PHOENIX -- A U.S. senator is examining a claim that two guns sold in purchases sanctioned by federal firearms agents were later used in a December shootout that left a Border Patrol agent dead near the Arizona-Mexico border.

Senator examines gun claim in border shootout

Mike also has a few other scandals for the committee to look into:

I also heard early this evening from an experienced lobbyist well connected to the new Congress. That there will be ATF oversight hearings -- dealing with not only the death of Brian Terry and the Project Gunwalker scandal but with the whole panoply of ATF scandals mentioned in these pages over the past two years -- is said to be a bet-the-farm certainty.

Is ‘Project Gunwalker’ about to bust wide open?

Passing the word on for some help.

Is ‘Project Gunwalker’ about to bust wide open?

We’ve recently discussed what I call “Project Gunwalker.” That title is a parody of the “Project Gunrunner” name the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has assigned to its southwest border initiative on U.S. guns going to the Mexican drug criminals, and refers to sourced information that the bureau has intentionally—and importantly, criminally, and with management cognizance—allowed guns to be transported across the border while keeping Mexican authorities in the dark.

Our Senator Grassley is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Contact him:

Office number in DC is 202-224-3744 and office number in Des Moines is 515-288-4415. Grassley's Second Amendment "go-to" guy is Nick Podsiadly and his Judiciary Committee guy, replacing Sessions' Stephen Miller, is Brian Downing.

via Sipsey Street Irregulars

It would seem that the ATF may have been complicit in allowing guns to Mexico from the US.

Pistol grip shotgun definition

Mike Vanderboegh reminds us of the current ATF definition of a pistol grip shotgun by emailing the ATF and demanding enforcement of the regulation?

The November 2009 FFL Newsletter (found at http://www.nfaoa.org/documents/ffl-newsletter-2009-11.pdf) states that a "Pistol Grip Firearm" (generically, a pump action shotgun with a pistol grip) is not a "shotgun." An October 27, 2010, letter from the Firearms Technology Branch ruled that such a firearm, with a 17" barrel and 26-1/4" overall length, was not subject to the National Firearms Act.

By ATF definitions, they would be classified a "any other weapon" along the lines of a sawed off shotgun.

S.T. 779 further states that "The test described by the [National Firearms] for determining whether a particular weapon comes within the classification of 'any other weapon' . . . is not the length of the barrel, but whether the weapon is capable of being concealed on the person," and that the foregoing gun met the definition of "any other weapon" under the NFA.

The potential legal ramifications come up if the use of such a weapon is prosecuted and then the precedent is set.

There are millions of such "pistol grip firearms" that have been lawfully owned by millions of law-abiding citizens for many years, and they are manufactured by a variety of firearms manufacturers. If these firearms were ruled to be NFA firearms, they would be instantly and involuntarily converted into illegal contraband. Moreover, under current law, there is no legal mechanism to enable their continued legal possession except by (1) registering them as NFA firearms during an amnesty established by the Attorney General, or (2) a change in the NFA law, which must be enacted by the Congress and signed by the President.

Something to think about.