According to a recent report in the Washington Post, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) could suffer budget cuts of almost 13 percent, which would effectively eliminate Project Gunrunner, a program designed to combat gun-trafficking from the U.S. to Mexico.
Any cuts to the already under-staffed and under-funded ATF would be a setback, but the kinds of cuts that are rumored would be devastating to the ATF's ability to interrupt the flow of illegal guns across America and Mexico. Worst of all, though, would be for the Obama Administration to pursue these cuts without pushing to implement strong, commonsense gun laws, such as those to ban large-capacity , assault weapons, and closing the gun show loophole.
These laws would be more effective and efficient because they offer a pro-active means -- instead of a reactive one -- to stemming the flow of guns to Mexican drug cartels and to criminals and gangs on America's streets. Not having an ATF director in place is also problematic. If we don't get these new laws and the ATF has to absorb substantial cuts, our nation will have effectively surrendered to the purveyors of the most massive gun violence in the U.S. and Mexico.
Paul Helmke is president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Follow the Brady Campaign on Facebook and Twitter.
(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on The Brady Campaign site.)
Review of ATF’s Project Gunrunner November 2010
Page 76
"the success rate of Mexican crime gun trace requests has declined since the start of Project Gunrunner. As illustrated in Figure 8, in FY 2005, 44 percent (661 of 1,518) of Mexican crime gun traces were successful. The success rate fell to 27 percent (4,059 of 14,979 in FY 2007 and remained only at 31 percent (6,664 of 21,726) in FY 2009."
According to the Inspector Generals data, during that five year period there were 18,585 successful traces out of 66,028 trace requests. That's a "success" rate of about 28%.
Page 75
"Yet, in a June 2009 report, the GAO estimated that less than a quarter of crime guns transferred to the Mexican Attorney General’s Office in 2008 were submitted to ATF for tracing"
2008 was also the year with the most traces, their best year. Purely for speculation, if we use an average of 25% of all captured guns are traced, that brings the total estimate of captured guns to 264,112. Suggesting a successful "trace to the US rate" of about 7%.
http://www.justice.gov/oig/reports/ATF/e1101.pdf
Do you really advocate rewarding bad behavior, Paul?
http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/
Since the ATF is the sole federal agency dedicated to regulating gun dealers and owners, they have to be depicted as flawless and without fault to promote the Brady Center's agenda. After all, if people know about their less then stellar history, then they might not trust them to enforce the kinds of laws Paul wants implimented.
Helmke, please explain what an "assault weapon" is. Please explain why a large-capacity magazine makes a weapon more criminal when it just decreases the reliability. Please explain what a vertical foregrip or a pistol grip have to do with criminality. Please explain why you seem to think a semi-automatic weapon is a tool of the devil. Please explain why a .50 caliber hunting rifle would be favorable to criminals when it's just expensive to shoot and impossible to conceal. Please explain what makes large-caliber handguns favorable to criminals when they are expensive to shoot, have extreme recoil, and are meant for hunters and hikers in places with a lot of bears. Please explain your insistence that certain hollow-point bullets are more able to penetrate body armor and have more expansion, as that is impossible. Please explain why the "gun show loophole" is evil, it is just use of a law that allows for a non-retailer to transfer legal ownership of a weapon to another if he/she has no reason to believe that the receiver wouldn't pass a background check.
http://azstarnet.com/news/local/border/article_b429a6cc-f8d0-521a-96f8-80a96f98edc1.html
In other words, the government is considering abandoning a costly program that has shown to be ineffective. I know, it's shocking! It almost never happends. But is doing so really such a bad thing?
ATF will have to prioritize its dollars. That means asking the hard question on each dollar, "Is this dollar going to something effective or not?" The gun control lobby fears such questions because they know gun control measures are at the bottom of the scale of effectiveness.
Paul is concerned, for good reason.
BTW, I have contacted the authors of the referenced WaPo article about several errors in that piece. WaPo is also extremely anti-gun.
Yes! Apart from the debate surrounding what "assault" means and the "loophole" that is legal transactions between citizens, it is CLEAR that large-capacity needs to be banned!
Large-capacity . . . airplanes, large-capacity . . . movie theaters, large-capacity . . . WHATEVER!
LARGE-CAPACITY MUST BE BANNED! Or you will die! And thirty-something other Americans will die today too . . . and . . . and . . . and the children! Think of the children and the threat of large-capacity to their futures as well!