This article was originally published by Frank Lee at The Mises Institute.
Many people who know anything about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE, or ATF for short) will know they started off as a “harmless” tax collecting agency that eventually turned into a law enforcement agency in its own right. In other words, they evolved from a bunch of glorified robbers with mechanical calculators and spreadsheets into a gang of violent thugs with guns and badges. This transformation became obvious to the world in the famous Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco (1993) incidents, both having had heavy ATF involvement and with the latter event culminating in an open massacre of the Branch Davidians that included women and children.
Later as they had cooled their trigger fingers, the ATF’s side gig of deliberately allowing guns to flow into Mexico for “tracking purposes” was exposed in the Fast and Furious scandal after two of these guns turned up near the scene of the killing of Brian Terry, a border patrol officer, in 2010 (a whole of lot of good this “tracking” did).
In more recent years, ATF’s favorite pastime has been to send several car-loads worth of thugs LARPing with full tactical gear to raid and intimidate American licensed gun dealers for supposed infractions of federal firearms laws and confiscate their property. Jim Skelton had his business raided in 2021 after a federal entrapping weasel lied on the federal background check forms and successfully purchased several firearms (a whole lot of good this “background check” did). Russell Fincher was raided at his home in 2023, one of the reasons being that he sold firearms without a Federal Firearms License (FFL), even though he had one. He was yelled at, threatened, and ultimately intimidated into giving up his license.
However, lately, the ATF must
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