Software Vault: The Gold Collection/Software Vault - The Gold Collection (American Databankers) (1993).ISO/cdr12/waco_tex.zip/BATF.TXT

Text File | 1993-06-04 | 22KB | 402 lines

                           GOVERNMENT'S HIDDEN AGENDA
                               by Bob Lesmeister

[reprinted from "We The People", Feb'92, published by Gun Owner's Action
 Committee, 862 Granite Circle, Anaheim CA 92806, who reprinted it from
 "American Firearms Industry", Jan'92, published by NAFLFD, 2455 E.
 Sunrise Blvd #916, Ft. Lauderdale FL 33304]

 - Bankrupt gun companies.
 - Limit the manufacture and sale of firearms based on false criteria.
 - Gather a list of persons who purchased so-called "assault weapons."

    All three of the above are direct assaults on the Second Amendment, all
three are being performed by BATF and others and all three are the first steps
to total gun control by devious means, since the powers that be cannot get the
kind of control they want through the legislature or the courts.

    Over the past four months, I have received calls from firearms dealers in
Arizona, California, New Jersey, and Ohio.  And although they are scattered
across the country, each related basically the same story.  BATF agents have
been collecting names and addresses of persons who have purchased what the
media has referred to as "assault weapons."

    The scenario goes something like this:  A couple of compliance agents come
to the shop to check bound books and Form 4473's.  As one leafs through the
4473's, another takes down names and addresses, but curiously enough, only
those names of people who have purchased AK- type and SKS rifles, and
Uzi/TEC-9-type carbines/pistols.

    One particular dealer in California said that when he questioned the
agents, they intimated that they would make things worse for him if he made a
"big deal" about it.  According to the dealer, his local law enforcement
officials were anti-gun and the regional BATF supervisor was working with
California officials to find out who owned "assault" rifles in the state.

    One firearms dealer in Arizona, who no longer runs a full-time shop, but
is currently engaged in a similar business, said compliance agents arrived at
his place to check out his records and they too jotted down names and
addresses of persons who had previously purchased AK-47 and SKS rifles.  When
he asked the agents why they were taking down certain names and not others,
they said something to the effect that it was "routine."

    With so many similar cases from different parts of the country, it would
seem there is a pattern.  So we requested from BATF in Washington, DC, an
explanation.  Here, in part, is their response:

    "Specifically, you requested to know whether there is a BATF directive for
     enforcement or compliance agents to collect the names and addresses of
     persons who have purchased semi-automatic rifles from dealers' 4473's or
     bound books.  At this time, there is no such ATF directive."

    That would lead one to several disturbing conclusions.  If BATF agents are
indeed collecting names and addresses, they are doing so without the knowledge
of the Director's office.  Or they are doing so with the Director's knowledge
and not admitting it.  Or they are collecting at the behest of state officials
in their attempt to enforce state law and local ordinances.  Or the dealers
that have expressed their concerns to us are lying.  However, the latter seems
unlikely because they all tell the same story, even though they are located
from one end of the country to the other.

    And the response from BATF with the words "At this time..." are no
comfort.  This would indicate that it could have occurred in the past or will
in the future.  We would appreciate hearing from dealers who have had similar
experiences.

The following is reprinted from the January, 1992 edition of NRAction, the
official periodical of NRA's Institute for Legislative Action.

            LAW-ABIDING GUN OWNER TARGET OF FEDERAL AGENTS

[A photograph of John Lawmaster holding two destroyed locks.  The cutline
reads: Guns drawn, some 60 federal agents, state and local police ransacked
John Lawmaster's Tulsa, Oklahoma, home; They did more than damage his
property.  They tore the fabric of the Bill of Rights.]

    "Well, it's been a rough month," begins Johnnie Lawmaster. "I just got
laid off, and my divorce became final.  But I just wasn't ready for what
happened this particular Monday."  That particular Monday was December 16, the
first day of the Bill of Rights' third century, the day when federal agents
and local law enforcement officers broke into the house in Tulsa that always
flew the U.S. flag.  When Lawmaster drove into the driveway that afternoon,
his neighbor had some news.

    "`Ohmigod, John, you're in big trouble!' my neighbor tells me. `Sixty
police, federal agents and the bomb squad busted in your house, kicked down
your door, cut locks off your gun safe.'  I couldn't believe it.  Then I
walked inside.  What a nightmare." It was no nightmare.  Acting on an
affidavit that Lawmaster possessed an illegal firearm, Tobacco and Firearms
teamed up with state and Tulsa police authorities, search warrant in hand, to
search for an illegal ".223 machinegun" or "parts."

                       "A CHILD COULD HAVE TAKEN A GUN"

    Reports vary, but according to neighbors, the joint task force operation
aimed at the unemployed warehouseman from a nearby hospital involved some 60
agents and local law enforcement personnel in a joint operation against
Lawmaster.

    They cordoned off the street; took station with weapons drawn in the back
yard; used a battering ram to break through the front door; kicked in the back
door; broke into his gun safe; threw personal papers around the house; spilled
boxes of ammunition on the floor; broke into a small, locked box that
contained precious coins; stood on a table to peer through the ceiling tiles,
breaking the table in the process.  Then, they left. The doors closed but were
not latched, much less locked.  The ammo and guns were unsecured.

    "My neighbor said about 20 officers hid by the back shed and a boat
trailered in the back yard before they began kicking in the back door. They
broke the lock on the shed and left it open.

    "My front and back doors were pulled shut, but they were busted through
and couldn't latch.  Anybody could have waltzed in there and stolen everything
I own.  A child could have taken a gun. The guns, the safe -- everything was
open and laying around.  I keep all my magazines empty, but someone had loaded
them.  While I was looking around in amazement, the gas, electric and water
companies show up to turn the power off.  They said they were told to shut
things down. Then I found the note."

    The note read: Nothing found -- ATF.

                            ARE YOU "ONE OF THEM"?

[Photograph of the inside of a gunsafe with guns strewn about. The
cutline reads: THE POWER OF GOVERNMENT: "My front and back doors...the
guns, the safe -- everything was open and laying around."]

    One agent pressed the neighbor for information about Lawmaster. Agents
began to break through the door of a trailer parked in Lawmaster's backyard,
but the neighbor protested.  "It was his trailer," Lawmaster relates.  "He had
a key and let them in.  Then he asked my neighbor if I had an AR-15, and he
said, `yeah.' `Does he have an auto sear,' and my neighbor said, `I don't
know.'  But my neighbor had an NRA cap on, so the agent said, `Lapse of
memory, huh?'"

    Lawmaster's neighbor told him the agent nodded toward the neighbor's hat
-- an NRA cap.  "The agent said, `You're one of _them_, and you don't know
what an auto sear is?'"

    The agent then pulled a book from the top of Lawmaster's stereo and,
flipping through it, asked the neighbor about the pictures of firearms shown
in the book.  "`Does he have this?  Does he have this? The agent keeps asking,
and my neighbor says, `no, no...'

    "They didn't make any attempt to notify me.  I've lived in Tulsa all my
life, and never got more than a traffic ticket.  How come they can't look that
up, realize I've been law-abiding my whole life, then come to the door when
I'm home?  They didn't leave someone here to watch over my private property.
They didn't even come by to explain what happened.  They just raided my home,
ransacked it, left it wide open and left."

    Lawmaster called the local ATF agent.  " I asked, `are you gonna' arrest
me?' and he said, `No.'  I asked him, `Who is going to repair and clean up my
house?' And he said, `If you're going to talk to me, come down to my office.'


                           A LITTLE GESTAPO BANTER
                             by Joseph P. Tartaro
                      reprinted from Gun Week, 24Apr'92

    I wonder if anyone has transcripts of conversations between German Gestapo
agents prior to a raid in a Nazi occupied European country prior to May 1945.
if so, I suspect it wouldn't sound much different from that recently reported
by The Philadelphia Inquirer involving two agents of the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms (BATF).

    On Apr.4, The Inquirer reported on a tape made by a police radio buff of
late-night "banter" between two BATF agents in March.  The two special agents
were discussing a suspect on their car radios.

    The exchange quoted in The Inquirer went as follows:

    "If he's there, are you going to beat him... ahhh, I mean interrogate
him?" asked one agent.

    "Just some light questioning," said the other.

    "I forgot," said the first agent, according to the Inquirer story.

    "Light questioning... that's less than 10 stitches, right?"

    "Static," the paper reported.

    As reported, the conversation was one of several among a number of BATF
agents that went out on the open air during and after a stakeout in mid-March.
Other taped conversations included an exchange in which one agent talked of
hoarding cases of confiscated fireworks in "our garage," and another joked
about taking over a suspect's pizza parlor and renaming it for a supervisor.

                              OFFICIAL RESPONSE

    When questioned by Inquirer reporters about the taped conversations,
Lester D. Martz, assistant special agent in charge of the BATF Philadelphia
office, did not seem to have the same concerns that civil libertarians might.

    Obviously conscious of the prospect of bad publicity, Martz said agents
should not even jokingly refer to brutality in an era when the Rodney King
incident in Los Angeles has sensitized a nation to excessive police force.

    He also said he thought the agents used bad judgment in using such public
communications.  "Who's to say John Crook wasn't listening?" the paper
reported Martz as saying.

    But one cannot help but wonder if the BATF is more worried about John
Crook or John Q. Public listening.

    Gilbert and Sullivan had a great song in The Pirates of Penzance about the
policeman's lot not being a happy one.  And that was before police radio
scanners, tape recorders and video cameras.

                                  ASSURANCES

    "Law enforcement experts said such open-air gabbing can damage a
department's integrity," The Inquirer reported, quoting George Parry, a former
US prosecutor and former head of the Philadelphia District Attorney's Police
Misconduct Unit.

    "It just makes you look dumb," the paper quoted Parry.  "Anybody listening
in is given the impression that these guys are up to no good."

    The official responses by Martz and Parry are far from assurances.

    They fail to address the question of police goon tactics suggesting that
what the agents do is okay as long as they don't talk about it on an
unscrambled radio channel.  The Inquirer reports that the two BATF agents
involved in the taped conversation were "cautioned" by superiors.

    But cautioned about what?  It would seem that getting caught in
conversations about beating a suspect, hoarding what should be evidence, and
taking over a suspect's business, even if in jest, is more serious than
actually thinking about or engaging in such lawless activity.

    The BATF has a history of jack-booting police work, in which entrapment
and goon tactics have been common.  For a while, Congressional hearings and
public scrutiny seemed to discourage those supervisors and agents given to
taking uncivil liberties.  But now there are increasing indications that the
agency may be going rogue again.

    The horror stories out of Oklahoma and elsewhere are destroying confidence
in an agency which recently had seemed to focus effectively on arresting and
convicting armed repeat offenders and major drug and gun runners.

    If the Philadelphia story were an isolated incident it might not deserve
further investigation or comment.  But coming as it does within a new wave of
reports of overzealousness among BATF agents, it is cause for renewed concern
and further investigation.  Maybe it's time for  Congress to start conducting
hearings again.  With all the media focus on guns and gun crimes these days,
the BATF may be getting the wrong message, suspecting that the general public
will condone any kind of Gestapo tactics as long as the enforcement statistics
look good.

                                  FIREWORKS

    What happened in the Philadelphia investigation?  The Inquirer reports
that on Mar. 24 BATF agents raided two trailers in Bensalem and "carted away
4,000 pounds of illegal fireworks. Agents arrested one Edward Stewart, 65, of
Bensalem and charged him with selling illegal fireworks.  No mention is made
of whether the agents took over the pizza parlor owned by the accused
fireworks seller.  However, after he gets finished paying for defense lawyers,
it just might be that a pizza parlor will be for sale cheap.  But then, a lot
of things can be sold cheaply - including civil liberties.

               -----------------------------------------------

    We've recently heard many in the media using the buzzwords "Assault
rifle."  I've just read some interesting statistics from an FBI report.  (The
year the report applies to was not included.)  In that year there were 743
homicides under the general heading rifles.  (They had no separate category
for "assault rifles", whatever they are.)  To put this figure in perspective,
during the same time period there were 3,503 homicides using good old
fashioned knives.  Blunt objects were used to dispatch 1,075 people.  Bare
hands and feet were said to have accounted for 1,112 more deaths.

    Hold one second... reaching for my filing cabinet... and guess how many
people died in Accidental falls, the year is 1986, 11,444.  More people killed
by falls than by murder by handguns in the same year 1986. . .4996.  Source:
"Vital Statistics of the United States" annual publication, at most libraries.

    From another interview:

        [Schulman:] "As a 'scientific control' on this analysis, I  would
        also appreciate it if you could compare your analysis of the text
        of the Second Amendment to the following sentence,

        "A well-schooled electorate, being necessary to the security of a
        free State, the right of the people to keep and read Books, shall
        not be infringed.'

        "My questions for the usage analysis of this sentence would be,

        "(1) Is the grammatical structure and usage of this sentence  and
        the  way  the words modify each other, identical  to  the  Second
        Amendment's sentence?; and

        "(2) Could this sentence be interpreted to restrict 'the right of
        the  people  to keep and read Books' _only_ to  'a  well-educated
        electorate' -- for example, registered voters with a  high-school
        diploma?"

        [Copperud:]  "(1)  Your 'scientific control'  sentence  precisely
        parallels the amendment in grammatical structure.

        "(2)  There is nothing in your sentence that either indicates  or
        implies the possibility of a restricted interpretation."


    So now we have been told by one of the top experts on American usage what
many knew all along:  the Constitution of the United States unconditionally
protects the people's right to keep and bear arms, forbidding all governments
formed under the Constitution from abridging that right.  (C) 1991 by The New
Gun Week and Second Amendment Foundation.

I.  "I KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT" OR WHAT IS AN "ASSAULT WEAPON"?

    There is considerable confusion about what is meant by the term "assault
weapon."  The term seems to be derived from the assault rifle, a military
weapon which can be fired like a machine gun, but uses smaller than ordinary
military (or big-game hunting) ammunition.

    Neither naming makes and models nor identifying some characteristics of
firearms provides a satisfactory way of identifying which rifles should be
"politically incorrect" in law. Functionally, the politically incorrect rifles
have more in common with ordinary semiautomatic rifles than with military
arms, but with some cosmetic similarities and some of the technological
improvements of their military step-parents.

    Unfortunately, most of the proposed and enacted legislation has been based
on how some firearms look to persons technically ignorant of arms and
ammunition.

II.  SO-CALLED "ASSAULT WEAPONS" ARE RARELY USED IN CRIME

    To the extent statistics have been collected by cities, states, and the
federal government, "assault weapons" are rarely involved in crime, normally
accounting for 0.1-0.3% of crime guns, with an estimated involvement in about
0.5% of homicides.  Relative to their availability, their use in crime is
diminishing rather than rising.

    While big-city police chiefs have generally attacked the firearms, their
departments' experts have not noted a problem, and the only formal surveys
indicate police opposition to "assault weapons" bans. Such bans would have two
unsatisfactory results: organized crime would be given a new source of revenue
through trafficking in a newly-banned substance, and ordinary citizens would
be persecuted and/or alienated from their government.


I.  "I KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT" OR WHAT IS AN "ASSAULT WEAPON"?

    Current legislation includes incorrect and misleading definitions of the
"assault weapons" that it targets.  Indeed, definitional problems in the
legislation are so serious that they would result in the failure to remove any
particularly dangerous class of weapons from the public sphere.

     Definitional problems are not normally at the core of the gun control
debate.  A "plastic gun" has been defined by Congress as any gun with less
than a certain minimum amount of metal.  A "Saturday Night Special" can be
defined as a gun with a particular barrel length and caliber, and whose metal
melts below a certain temperature (thereby indicating poor quality
manufacture).

    A "machine gun" is often considered any gun which fires over and over with
just a single squeeze of the trigger.  But what is an "assault weapon"?  No
legislative body in this country has yet found a logically consistent
definition.

    That the guns to be prohibited may sometimes be the best firearms for
self-defense does not matter to some advocates of prohibition. As New York
City Mayor David Dinkins responded to self-defense arguments: "I'm telling you
this nonsense that the Constitution entitles us to a weapon to defend
ourselves is not an appropriate response to [gun prohibition] legislation."

    Mayor Dinkins, whose 24 hour-a-day government bodyguards don tuxedos for
the Mayor's black-tie evening social functions, need not concern himself with
the "nonsense" of personally owning a gun for self- defense.  Most Americans
are not so fortunate.

     What limited polling of law enforcement has been done does not support
the claims of Handgun Control, Inc., that all the police want  "assault
weapon" prohibition.

    The Florida chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police polled its membership
and found 75% opposed to an "assault weapon" ban.  The most recent poll of
police opinion was carried out by Law Enforcement Technology magazine in March
1991.  The results were reported in the July/August 1991 issue:  "75% do not
favor gun control legislation...with street officers opposing it by as much as
85%."  In particular, 78.7% opposed a ban on "assault weapons."  (About 37% of
top management supported a ban, and about 11% of street officers.)96

    Every spring the National Association of Chiefs of Police (NACOP) conducts
a nationwide survey of command-rank police officers (not just top management
or chiefs).  The survey includes all command-rank officers, including those
who do not belong to NACOP.  Ninety-five percent said that they believed a
citizen should have the right to purchase any type of firearm for sport or
self-defense.

   Neither the Law Enforcement Technology nor the NACOP surveys may be
statistically precise, since the surveys were compiled from respondents who
voluntarily mailed in a reply.  But at the very least, the surveys indicate
that Handgun Control, Inc.'s claim to have the near-unanimous support of the
law enforcement community is false.

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