The Patriot Post - Obama's Assault on Weapons

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The Patriot Post - Obama's Assault on Weapons
From The Federalist Patriot
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Obama's Assault on Weapons
By Mark Alexander · Thursday, March 31, 2011
Project Gunrunner Backfires on the Left

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." --Second Amendment to the United States Constitution

Barack Hussein Obama and his Socialist cadre1, in their enthusiasm to "fundamentally transform2 the United States of America," have redoubled efforts to do what all tyrannical governments must do to establish absolute state supremacy and usurp Rule of Law3 -- disarm the people.

Leftists accomplish this through incremental implementation of gun confiscation measures, most of which are overt political machinations. These include legislation written and promoted by Leftist groups such as the American Bar Association, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, the Violence Policy Center, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and the Brady Campaign.

Current legislation under consideration includes H.R. 308 to limit rounds in magazines, S. 35 to lock in gun show registrations, S. 436 designed to "fix gun checks," and, most disturbing, the reauthorization of Section 215 of The Patriot Act, which permits the FBI to seize gun sale records (4473's) pursuant to "an authorized investigation." Regarding the latter, the Inspector General estimated that between 2003 and 2006, the FBI exceeded its authority under Section 215 in more than 6,000 instances.

The objective of most of this legislation is centralized registration, which provides the federal government with data on the owner of every gun in the U.S. Then, under the duress of, say, the collapse of our economy4, Leftists will "justify" confiscation by way of such nefarious measures as an Executive Order -- just as they justified weapons confiscations after Hurricane Katrina.

"Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste," right?

The generation that witnessed the adulteration of our Constitution5 by Franklin Roosevelt and his Useful Idiots6 during the Great Depression know exactly what I mean. Fortunately, growing ranks of Patriots7 across our nation are awakening to this very real threat against our Second Amendment rights.

As FDR aptly demonstrated, the primary method in the Left's playbook for advancing its agenda is to convert tragedy into political capital. That is precisely what they did with the shooting of Democrat Rep. Gabrielle Giffords8 and others in Tucson in January of this year, and that is the rallying point for current gun control legislation.

Of course, claiming "gun violence9" is the problem, rather than social entropy10 institutionalized by FDR's policies and those of his Socialist successors, is a better fit with the Left's agenda.

Another case in point, and one that is now backfiring on the Obama administration, is Project Gunrunner, a government program run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). As you may recall, ATF is an agency that exposed itself as a puppet for political agendas in the botched and bloody assaults at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and Waco, Texas, in 1993.

The ATF implemented Project Gunrunner in 2006 as a strategy to track weapon distribution networks between the U.S. and Mexican drug cartels -- a worthy goal on the surface. Problem is, once the guns crossed into Mexico, ATF lost most of its tracking capability, which is to say that efforts to follow the distribution trail and stem the tide ended at the border.

Enter the Obama administration's gun control agenda, which breathed new life into Gunrunner and re-established the ATF leadership's standard ops tempo: SNAFU.

While Project Gunrunner failed in charting weapons distribution channels south of the border, Democrats saw its utility as a means to implement new gun regulations north of the border by asserting that all the violence in the region is the result of gun sales in the U.S.

The Obama administration hoped to make a case that Mexican organized crime syndicates depend on illegal U.S. sales of so-called "assault weapons." In doing so, they hoped to revitalize their political agenda to register and regulate the sale of those weapons -- a major Leftist goal for the last two decades.

With its mission transformed, in 2009 and 2010 the ATF expanded Project Gunrunner offices to McAllen, Texas, El Centro, California, Las Cruces, New Mexico, Sierra Vista, Arizona, and Brownsville, Texas, and added new Gunrunner teams in Tucson and in El Paso, Texas. Project Gunrunner's focus became exposing the illegal sale of guns in the U.S. in support of Obama's political objectives.

But the ATF's Gunrunner is now the subject of a political firefight.

On 28 December 2010, I was contacted by a career federal agent who, like many of his colleagues, honors his oath to "support and defend11" our Constitution, whose support and defense is contingent on the Second Amendment's12 prohibition against government infringement on the right of citizens to keep and bear arms.

The contacting agent, who has a good track record of identifying government agendas designed to thwart 2A13 rights, told me that he suspected the weapon used in the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on 14 December was among those lost by the ATF during the Gunrunner operation a few months earlier. Senior career agents in Phoenix and Tucson confirmed that some of the weapons recovered at the scene of the murder of Agent Terry were, indeed, Project Gunrunner weapons, but because the ATF took control of the weapons, it could evade the establishment of any ballistic link between Project Gunrunner and the bullet that killed Terry.