The wages of NRA weenywagon sellout.

Long-time readers may recall my previous response three years ago to the collectivist citizen disarmament advocate Dan Thomasson at the time of his screed entitled "The several varieties of gun nuts."

Now Thomasson is thrilled at the NRA and NSSF sellout on B. Toad Jones. Not surprisingly, Thomasson has some advice for the new permanent director of the federal gun cops: "BATF’s B. Todd Jones must confront gun violence."

The gun lobby and its supporters, who have continuously demanded more enforcement against illegal firearms trafficking rather than new restrictions, have given an inch toward backing up their demands by permitting the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to have a permanent director for the first time in seven years.

The Senate voted Wednesday to approve B. Todd Jones to lead the agency. It is now up to the ATF to pull itself together under the long-denied central command and come up with an overall policy for cutting down criminal gun violence. That won’t be easy, considering road blocks such as the lack of universal background checks for firearms purchasers of all stripes and in every venue and Congress’s failure to limit the sale of high-powered military weapons or the number of bullets in a clip. But it is a start.

Whether Jones himself is up to the task still is to be determined. Certainly, until his confirmation last week in the Senate with the acquiescence of the National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the two main antagonists of the gun-control forces, Jones was handicapped by also holding down his U.S. attorney’s post in Minneapolis. With that burden lifted, he now is free to focus on tough questions, including the movement of firearms to Mexico. . .

Thomasson concludes:

Jones must make some friends on Capitol Hill and show that the agency has never opposed lawful gun ownership and usage -- from ATF’s origins in the Treasury Department and following its transfer to the Justice Department after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America. It will take a lot of skill to increase the agency’s budget and build ATF’s force from 2,500 agents to a respectable level. Congressional toadies of the NRA have manacled ATF as no other federal law enforcement has ever been.

Loosening the stranglehold on ATF to allow a permanent director does not mean that the gun lobby will embrace the agency. This may just be a move designed by the NRA to convince its critics that it is willing to be sensible about some things, after it defeated the president’s attempt at new gun restrictions following the massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Whatever, it is an important gesture for the agency, which for too long has been the whipping boy for Second Amendment casuists who believe the founding fathers wanted us all to put a gun under our pillows at night.

Jones needs to make the best of this.

Yes, well, it is an opportunity that Jones -- a man described by sources of this column as a "Nuremberg Man" who "would Waco his own grandmother if ordered to do so" -- wouldn't have if Wayne LaPierre and the Lairds of Fairfax hadn't handed it to him on a silver plate. The sellout bastards.