In a late Monday morning report, the Associated Press's Erica Werner wondered why "the White House has yet to take any new steps on gun violence" he supposedly promised in the wake of the January shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
Either Werner or the headline writers at AP are getting extraordinarily impatient, as seen in the headline which follows the jump:
PROMISES, PROMISES: Obama yet to act on gun safety
Whoever is responsible for the headline seems to be expecting some kind of unilateral action, even though anything meaningful would -- or perhaps the correct word is "should" -- require getting a law through Congress. The rest of Werner's report cites what she believes is a failure by Obama to follow through on a vague "promise" made at Giffords' funeral: "if we're serious about keeping guns away from someone who's made up his mind to kill, then we can't allow a situation where a responsible seller denies him a weapon at one store, but he effortlessly buys the same gun someplace else."
Obama's previous track record, legislative and otherwise, is extraordinarily hostile to Second Amendment rights, so much so that he felt compelled to try to comfort a "hand-picked crowd" in Pennsylvania (HT Tim Graham at NewsBusters) during the 2008 presidential campaign by telling them:
“If you’ve got a gun in your house, I’m not taking it," Obama said. But the Illinois senator could still see skeptics in the crowd, particularly on the faces of several men at the back of the room.
So he tried again. “Even if I want to take them away, I don’t have the votes in Congress,"" he said. “This can’t be the reason not to vote for me. Can everyone hear me in the back? I see a couple of sportsmen back there. I’m not going to take away your guns."
A reasonable conclusion from the above would be that he would take them away if he could.
It's important to remember the anti-gun zealotry of Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and many others in the administration, because the latest developments in a shocking scandal known as Operation Fast and Furious aka "Gunwalker" aka "Gun Runner" are beginning to make the enterprise look like an effort to create a climate of gun violence to be used as a pretext for short-circuiting Second Amendment rights.
If this is the first time you've heard of Fast and Furious, sit down and brace yourself, as Bob Owens at Pajamas Media recites the particulars (bolds are mine):
Mega-Scandal: Was ‘Gunwalker’ a PR Op for Gun Control?
The most damning revelations coming out of the hearings on Operation Fast and Furious held by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform are the unmistakable indications that the program was never designed to succeed as a law enforcement operation at all.
A quartet of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) agents and supervisors turned into whistleblowers to bring the operation down, but only after U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was gunned down in the Arizona desert. Two of the weapons recovered at the scene of Terry’s murder were traced to the operation.
Fast and Furious, also known by the more accurate “Gunwalker,” allowed known straw purchasers to buy large quantities of firearms — often a dozen or more semi-automatic rifles — at a time with the full knowledge of ATF agents and executives. The guns were then smuggled into Mexico, as frustrated front-line ATF agents watched, under strict orders to do nothing.
ATF agents testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee could not explain how the operation was supposed to succeed when their surveillance efforts stopped at the border and interdiction was never an option.
ATF Agent John Dodson, testifying in front of the committee, said that in his entire law enforcement career, he had “never been involved in or even heard of an operation in which law enforcement officers let guns walk.” He continued: “I cannot begin to think of how the risk of letting guns fall into the hands of known criminals could possibly advance any legitimate law enforcement interest.”
The obvious answer is that Gunwalker’s objective was never intended to be a “legitimate law enforcement interest.” Instead, it appears that ATF Acting Director Ken Melson and Department of Justice senior executives specifically created an operation that was designed from the outset to arm Mexican narco-terrorists and increase violence substantially along both sides of the Southwest border.
Success was measured not by the number of criminals being incarcerated, but by the number of weapons transiting the border and the violence those weapons caused. An ATF manager was “delighted” when Gunwalker guns started showing up at drug busts. It would be entirely consistent with this theory if DOJ communications reflected the approval of the ATF senior officials they were colluding with — but as we know, Holder’s Department of Justice refuses to cooperate.
It would seem that Owens has little need to frame his post's title as a question.
Holder's refusal to cooperate is true to the administration's "Gangster Government" instincts (Michael Barone first coined the term in May 2009 in the wake of the Obama administration's orchestrated short-circuiting of the legal rights of many of Chrysler's secured creditors; the name grows more apt with virtually each passing day).
A total non-shock is the fact that Fast and Furious aka "Gunwalker" aka "Gun Runner" was barely news in the national establishment press until about 10 days ago; a Google News search at 9:30 p.m. on ["Eric Holder" ATF] (typed exactly as indicated between brackets; sorted by date) returned 112 items from the past 30 days. 85 of them are older than June 12, and of the 27 older items, a half-dozen at most are from national mainstream sources. One of them, from the Hill on May 25, reports that "Attorney General Eric Holder has denied knowing of Gun Runner." If so, why is he stonewalling?
The Associated Press conveniently kept Eric Holder's name out of the single story ("ATF agents: Border weapons operation a disaster" on June 15) it appears to have done on the scandal. Apparently, the wire service's reporters have been too busy trying to cook up sympathy for gun control in other, less lethal ways to stick with a story which, if it had surfaced during the Bush administration, would likely have been called "the next Iran-Contra" and dominated the headlines for weeks.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
