Happy July 4th!

Celebrate Independence Day (while you still can)

It seems to me that our historical celebration of Independence day has taken away from us, like many other rights and privliges, under the guise of "safety".  To be sure, there are some compelling reasons to limit fireworks sales to those 18 and older.  But many cities, especially throughout California, have banned the sale, possession and use of fireworks altogether.  The "company line" is if you want to enjoy fireworks, go see a city or county-sponsored display. In a sense, this is like telling us you don't need a gun for protection, just phone the police.  It's the government usurping what was once a citizen's proud tradition.

Yeah, kids do stupid things with fireworks sometimes. When we were kids, some were fired off into the air with slingshots. Our biggest worry wasn't setting fire to a house, but landing one on old (he was 55) Mr. Roberson's house and his reaction!  But none of us had any serious accidents and no one was maimed or burned (much).  I like to think of those days an a IQ test. If you weren't smart enough to figure out a simple chemical-thermal reaction and it's consequences, you deserved to get burned or hurt. 

Now, budget cuts and shortfalls are causing even the government to give up fireworks displays. One town in California said it could no longer afford it and cancelled their 25 year tradition. However, when several businesses stepped up to subsidize the display, the city rejected their offer, then rejected their attempt to get a permit at the city's traditional location. The city had decided there just would not be any display at all.  The government taketh and the government prohibits.  Kiss another American tradition good-bye.

Whitewash at the Washington Post

It's no news that the Washington Post acts almost as a PR sheet for the Democrat party.  So it was no surprise to see them run a whitewash article on ATF's Fast and Furious.  Noted plagiarist Sari Horowitz wrote her hit piece, praising Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) for his report on our "weak gun laws" and trying to pass the blame off on Congress and the NRA. 

Cummings interviewed gun control advocates and a couple of ATF agents (a redundant statement to be sure) then published a wish-list of gun control laws on the Brady Campaign's Christmas list.  Cummings, of course, did not hear from any gun-rights witnesses.

Titled “Outgunned,” the 26-page report recommends stronger penalties for “straw purchasers” who illegally buy guns for others and a reporting requirement for multiple purchases of long guns, such as AK-47s. Cummings will hold a forum on the report Thursday on Capitol Hill.

This is the amazing part. "Stronger penalties" for a straw-purchase?  Current law says you can be fined up to $250,000 and given 10 years in jail.  That's pretty damn severe.  But obviously it's not much of a deterrent if people are still committing the crime.  But wait. It gets better.

Larry Alt, a lawyer and senior ATF field agent, testified that “we don’t get traction with the U.S. attorney’s office. They don’t follow through. They don’t want to prosecute cases.”

So, even if the penalties were stiffer, no one gets prosecuted because the U.S. Attorneys fail to prosecute?  Unless I miss my guess, it's not the law which is "toothless" here.  It's the spineless U.S. Attorneys installed by the Obama administration who can't be bothered to enforce the laws.  Even if we made it a capital punishment crime, there's no deterrent if few are ever prosecuted for it.

ATF proposed a multiple long-gun reporting scheme earlier and it was pointed out that they lacked the authority to do so.  Such reporting would need to be mandated by Congress, not by a regulatory fiat order from ATF.  But even if we had put such a program in place, how would that have helped?  C'mon now, the gun dealers were calling ATF about straw buyers and it was ATF itself that authorized the sales to proceed.  How would another piece of paper stopped these crimes when ATF is an accomplice to the crime?

Agents also said their efforts to combat the cartels would be strengthened with a federal statute criminalizing gun trafficking.

I sure hope they meant illegal gun trafficking. There are already laws against exporting firearms from the U.S. without a license or permit from the State Department. So, that means a statute against trafficking across the US-Mexican borders would be redundant. 

So what would constitute illegal trafficking?  That would be some kind of "illegal" movement of firearms within the U.S.  So, if you legally purchase 5 AR-15 rifles in Arizona the week before you move to, say Missouri, is that then "trafficking"? 

Obtaining arms illegally - straw buys, from illegal dealers and theft - are already illegal acts. So is selling them without a license.  All these acts have substantial penalties attached. So, why is it we need yet another law to combat trafficking?
The Cummings "forum" and his report are simply political propaganda intended to push for more ineffective and useless gun control laws.  Cummings should be ashamed of jumping on this bandwagon to divert the attention of the public from the ATF scandal.  The fact is that people died because of the ATF's screw up and those responsible should be held accountable.  Cummings report focuses on the deaths of Mexican soldiers, political figures and journalists in Mexico.  But he ignores the more than 150 innocent Mexican citizens (the figure is probably several times that number) and then jumps to the number of American citizens killed in Mexico.  I can thus infer that Cummings doesn't give a rat's ass about the average Mexican, unless he is a government employee like Cummings. 

Representative Cummings should be ashamed of himself.  He should be called to task for this whitewash of ATF's illegal activities and his disregard for the suffering of Mexican citizens.

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