Saturday, June 6, 2015

The ATF as unlikely heroes?

"The PoA sticks resolutely to declaiming the virtues of gun control, to non-problems like 3D printing (China, predictably, wants to require a government license to own a 3D printer), and to high-tech magic bullets like radio-frequency ID tagging (which can be defeated by putting a gun in a microwave for a few seconds, which zaps the ID chip) and the micro-stamping of ammo cartridges."
And, of course, it blames the U.S. Earl Griffith, of the Firearms Technology Branch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, spoke to the meeting on Tuesday on marking and the U.S. eTrace system. As always, the U.S. has stood out at this meeting because it is one of the few nations that knows what it is talking about — most of the so-called experts in the room are nothing of the sort. But inevitably, Griffith came under attack when he stated, accurately, that in the U.S. if you make a firearm for your own personal use, and are not engaged in the firearms business, you don’t need to mark it. There is no evidence that homemade U.S. firearms are contributing to the illicit international arms trade. It gave me a lot of pleasure to watch Griffith, with the aid of his colleagues in the U.S. delegation, defending U.S. law and policies with determination. As the U.S. speakers pointed out, the PoA is utterly irrelevant to what the U.S. does inside its borders, and it is up to the U.S. court system to decide whether firearms manufacture inside the U.S. has violated U.S. laws. Even better was the reminder from the ATF that “we’re proud of many things here, including our Constitution and the right to lawfully possess and use our weapons.”

7 comments:

Jerry The Geek said...

A Vietnamese refugee once told me: "Don't listen to what the Communists say, watch what they do".

I'll believe this is more than posturing before the International Community when I see the ATF treating their 'family'with more respect.

Anonymous said...

Imagine if they got tired of being the bad guys....they could do a lot of good.

Seriously.

"You know, we've taken a look at this and determined that we've been acting in an unconstitutional fashion regarding this, so we're not going to enforce this any more, and we're going to make it as easy as possible for people to comply with all the other rules and regs. If we find you're in arrears on your tax payments, we're going to give you XX days to pay."

Imagine if they woke up one day and realized that they are a tax collection agency....and that doing exactly that was the best way to ensure the survival of their agency and stop being a used like a crack whore by the politicians.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a single person in that agency who is that smart, or it would already have happened.

Longbow said...

I can hardly believe such a thing was said. In recent years, the ATF representative would have been on his knees felating each member of PoA, at the direction and with the blessing of each previous U.S. chief executive.

MamaLiberty said...

Wait just a minute! Unless the gun is 100% plastic or some other non metal, it cannot be put into a microwave to defeat the ID. You would destroy the microwave, and quite possibly the gun - and I have no idea what other damage it might cause. Find another way... or don't have guns with an ID chip to start with.

Anonymous said...

That's one in a row.

B Woodman
III-per

Anonymous said...

"Imagine if they got tired of being the bad guys....they could do a lot of good."

REALLY!?

People who intimidate, extort, destroy property, injure and MURDER others in the prosecution of their "mandates' and then have the ability to cover the incidents up, with the assistance of no less than the national legislature, are very unlikely candidates for a soul searching conversion to truth, justice, understanding of human rights and fidelity to the constitution and bill of rights, as the framers knew them.

They have their own interpretations of what is both good and just, constitutional and unconstitutional, and their judges will swear to their interpretations, on a stack of bibles without even blinking, in the face of the published works of those framers.

the Plinker said...

When I read this I thought it sounded to good to be true. And you know the reeeest of the story...