You mean I have to count these? Every year?!
I know that this topic has
come up before. But since the NRA continues to attack law enforcement of gun laws, while pretending to be on their side, some repetition to counter theirs seems in order. And today, the latest from Media Matters digs into the details, and the long history of the NRA in working to undermine law enforcement, primarily through attacking the ATF.
The good news is that in spite of the NRA's best efforts, Media Matters reports that gun prosecutions increased in 2012.
One of the topics of the
Media Matters article is the Tiahrt Amendments, one of many ways the NRA frustrates law enforcement. And last week, Chris Cox, executive director at the NRA-ILA, got an opinion piece in the
USA Today defending the Tiahrt Amendments. Here's some of what Cox had to say about them.
Gun control advocates complain that Congress stopped the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from making firearms dealers conduct costly annual inventories to keep their records straight.
So in the opening salvo of his argument, the NRA spokesman has to admit that gun dealers don't want to be
burdened by an annual inventory. That somehow an annual inventory would be so costly and onerous. In what other line of sales is it a plus to
not keep track of what you've got in the store? The NRA's just begging us to let crooked gun dealers cover up their activity! That an annual inventory would be that awful for dealers who sell lethal weapons is laughable already, but Cox goes on...
Common sense tells us that placing additional burdens on law abiding gun retailers will do nothing to reduce crime, but placing the full weight of our criminal justice system on lawbreakers will.
Of course, the problem here is that nobody knows for certain which gun dealers are law abiding, and making sure we never find out is a key part of the NRA's strategy to frustrate law enforcement. The Tiahrt Amendments are a good example. They've been the target of
campaigns to reform them for years. Consider the proposed back-breaking federal mandate that gun dealers should perform an annual inventory. Here is some explanation as to the problem faced by the ATF by Bloomberg's outfit, Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
ATF still does not have the power to require dealer inventory checks to detect lost and stolen guns:
While dealers must notify ATF if they discover that guns from their inventories have been lost or stolen, the Tiahrt Amendments prevent ATF from requiring gun dealers to conduct annual physical inventory checks to detect losses and thefts. ATF reported that in 2007 it found 30,000 guns missing from dealer inventories based on its inspection of just 9.3% of gun dealers.
Even while suffering every legislative impediment the NRA can throw at it, the ATF still finds thousands of missing guns, and from the small fraction of inspections it can perform compared to what it could be doing. And while these amendments and riders have had to be renewed each year by attaching them to appropriations bills,
NPR identified the NRA behind the recent push to make these riders permanent.
Media Matters also cited a recent report by the Center for American Progress about more legislative riders used by the NRA to quietly chip away at gun laws, year after year.
CAP explained that "more than a dozen appropriations riders passed each year, typically without any discussion or debate, which significantly limit the federal government's ability to regulate the firearms industry and fight gun-related crime." Among the NRA-supported riders is one that prohibits the ATF from centralizing gun sale records, meaning that it can take weeks to trace a firearm used in a crime.
Who is served by this inability of the ATF to trace crime guns effectively? The dealers, perhaps the manufacturers? Certainly not law enforcement, or even basic justice. The NRA claims to want to preserve gun owners' rights and privacy, but the real effect is obstruction of justice.
And, as I wrote about months ago, as has been the case for years, the ATF still has no director. In this case, it's not even difficult to connect the dots, no secret ninja legislation required; the NRA's opposition here is obvious. The President put this on his agenda, likewise, months ago. We're still waiting.
To show the lengths to which the NRA will protect crooked gun dealers at the expense of law and order, Media Matters found this rare case of failed NRA supported legislation from 2010.
In 2010, the NRA supported legislation that would have allowed ATF to only impose sanctions on gun dealers that "willfully" commit violations of ATF rules, meaning that corrupt dealers could attempt to avoid prosecution by claiming that their violations were mistakes and not intentional.
According to a Washington Post editorial, this and other provisions in the legislation would mean that "[t]he bar for action is set so high that it would make it all but impossible for the ATF to press forward with any case." The legislation was reported by the Post in September 2010 as making "headway," but the bill never reached the Senate floor.
That's the NRA for you, though. They defend
criminals, they fight to keep guns in the hands of
domestic abusers. They demonize the government with
conspiracy theories about record-keeping leading thieves to the doors of gun owners. They're willing to throw those suffering from mental illness by calling them
"lunatics" and "monsters," giving frightened gun enthusiasts something else to be scared of.
And here we see the NRA protecting corrupt gun dealers from prosecution, then blaming law enforcement for not "placing the full weight of our criminal justice system on lawbreakers", as Chris Cox opined about in the USA Today. It makes me wonder if, at some point, the attention of law enforcement will ever fall on the NRA itself, for all the damage they've done to our society.