RUTHFULLY YOURS

A handful of Democratic lawmakers in Congress and a fish cop ^[1] held a press conference Friday to announce a new gun control proposal ^[2], the “Stop Gun Trafficking and Strengthen Law Enforcement Act.” The proposed law has no chance of passing, and seems orchestrated as a Democratic response meant to draw attention away from the still-developing “Gunwalker” scandal:

U.S. Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD), ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) will join other members and a leading law enforcement organization for an event Friday, July 15th, 11:00 a.m. at the House Triangle to introduce the “Stop Gun Trafficking and Strengthen Law Enforcement Act,” which establishes a dedicated firearms trafficking statute to empower law enforcement to keep high-powered firearms out of the hands of dangerous criminals, including Mexican drug cartels.

The exact same agencies that would be charged with enforcing the proposal are currently under investigation — and may eventually face felony charges — because they broke existing laws and participated in widespread gun trafficking. To borrow from a reader, the federal government is using federal agencies to break federal laws so that same federal government can impose more federal laws on the people that did not break the law.

It is Orwellian in its absurdity, and yet entirely real.

For those of you arriving to the story late, the scandal of Gunwalker began when ATF whistleblowers testified about a multi-agency federal program in Arizona called “Operation Fast and Furious.” The program was carried out by a multi-agency task force involving elements of the Department of Justice; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Drug Enforcement Agency; and the Internal Revenue Service. It would also have likely required the involvement of the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security.

As executed, the plot allowed straw purchasers to buy thousands of firearms and deliver them to Mexican drug cartels, presumably so that the ATF could learn who the primary gun smugglers were inside the cartels in order to shut them down. It was recently revealed, however, that at least some of the men the ATF were seeking may have been paid informants for the FBI and DEA ^[3].

Within the past week, evidence has emerged suggesting that the plot was not confined to Arizona. Similar programs existed in at least three other regions, including an operation that may have been called “Castaway ^[4]” that shipped roughly 1,000 firearms to the violent gang MS-13 in Honduras from a multi-agency operation based in Tampa.

These politicians — who seem immune to either common sense or irony — can perhaps be convinced to re-title this legislation the Eddie Espinoza ^[5] Act of 2011, in honor of the Democratic mayor of Columbus, NM, who was recently convicted of trafficking guns to Mexican drug cartels. Espinoza may face up to 65 years in prison — up to 10 years in federal prison for each of the smuggling counts and up to five years for the conspiracy charge as well as each of the false statement charges — for committing many of the same criminal acts (on a much smaller scale) as those carried out by the federal government that prosecuted his case.

Representatives Maloney, Cummings, and Carolyn McCarthy seem to be far less interested in holding those responsible for Gunwalker to account than they are in persecuting gun owners and hobbling the investigations into the scandal being played out in the House and Senate.

We saw this disreputable behavior from Cummings when he held a minority forum ^[6][6]several weeks ago that was focused on blame-shifting instead of accountability, and in the 26-page political report ^[7] that minimized the magnitude of the crimes perpetrated under the guise of law enforcement while building the case for gun control.

Anti-gun Democrats are pushing laws that would only affect the law-abiding, while attempting to direct attention away from what appears to be a widespread criminal conspiracy by executive branch agencies to arm narco-terrorists and then use the violence caused by those weapons to influence U.S. gun laws ^[8].

Americans don’t need more gun laws.

What me need are federal law enforcement agencies, legislators, and elected and appointed officials that aren’t willing to “break a few eggs” — or a few hundred lives — in order to take part in an illegal and murderous conspiracy.