- Abolish the ATF. My personal favorite. If there’s no ATF, then there’s no agency to lean on FFL dealers and pressure them to sell guns to known straw purchasers against their will.
- Defund the ATF. Cut them down to the bare minimum needed to process NFA paperwork, and they won’t be able to afford to pay the idiots who thought this plan was a good idea.
- Appoint a special prosecutor to charge everyone person in the ATF and DOJ involved in Fast and Furious; if the people responsible for overseeing them can’t do their jobs, bring them up on charges and throw them in jail. Especially if they’re actively breaking the law instead of enforcing it.
For some reason, I don’t think any of these are what the New York Times and Holder have in mind…
The attorney general apparently did his damnedest to conflate Fast and Furious with Operation Wide Receiver (Andrew McCarthy goes into detail on how exactly the two programs differed (substantially, as it turnes out (for example, in Wide Receiver, ~350 guns were involved and the US had the cooperation of the Mexican government; in Fast and Furious, more than 2000 guns were involved, and the Mexican government was completely in the dark))).
The paper of making up the record* (and Holder as well) are also incredulous that many are opposed to the ATF’s proposed multiple long gun purchase registration requirement; the only problem with that is that it’s illegal.
It was also nice to see someone publicly refute the Mexican Gun Canard:
By comparison, Mr. Holder and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, noted statistics showing that of the nearly 100,000 guns that were seized in Mexico and traced in recent years, about two-thirds originated in the United States.
Mr. Grassley said those numbers were “faulty” as a portrayal of the smuggling of weapons that had been sold in a retail store in the United States. They include weapons that had originally been sold to the Mexican military, weapons that were transferred into Mexico many years ago, Fast and Furious guns, and firearms from other sources, he said.
If anything about Fast and Furious was botched, it’s that this effort at under the radar gun control failed so spectacularly. If the ATF had had their way, they’d probably just use this as “proof” gun stores are arming the cartels and that we need more gun control to combat them. As it is, the ATF and DOJ look like incompetent fools and still are crying for more gun control.