"Illegal," "immoral" -- In any case it's your tax dollars at work. "How the ATF Manufactures Crime." And where are the ATF oversight hearings you promised Mr. Issa?

"Jeez, something stinks at the ATF. Maybe somebody should investigate. Oh, wait, that would be me, wouldn't it?"

At best the ATF’s new techniques constitute illegal entrapment. At worst, they are downright tyrannical. Entrapment is legally permitted if a suspect initiates a crime in the presence of an undercover agent or if he can reasonably be deemed to have been predisposed to commit the crime when offered an opportunity to do so. But it is difficult to see how either of these tests is being met in the Bruner case or in others. Indeed, cases using entrapment are often thrown out of court if the government is seen to have put too much pressure on a suspect or to have made breaking the law so easy or attractive as to render restraint impossible. Per the paper’s report, ATF tactics involved offering ridiculous prices for firearms to attract straw purchasers, requesting that suspects buy specific firearms that carry tougher sentences, or, as it did in one case, showing a known felon how to saw off a shotgun so that they could charge him with a more serious violation when he did it. Will anyone claim that these tactics are legal? That they are immoral, too, needs less spelling out.

Of course, the DOJ is starting its tried-and-true cover-up mode already: "Justice Department supports probe into ATF rogue tactics."