By Paul Weiser
A federal agency persecuting business establishments is nothing new, but exposing the agency's rampant paranoia in open court takes the cake. Of greater significance is the root cause (to use liberal-speak where truly warranted) of the derangement.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATFE) is conducting a long-running persecution of an Idaho gun store, trying to shut it down. The method (in lieu of ATFE's favored tactic, entrapment) is to pretend the few paperwork errors discovered constitute felonious and intentional evasion of ATFE's admittedly arbitrary regulations.
As an aside, if even a longstanding pattern of record- keeping errors were evidence of criminal intent everyone in ATFE since 1934 would be in prison. The state of the National Firearms Registry - ATFE's database of machine-guns and "other weapons" - is so howlingly, knowingly inaccurate as to defy belief. But of course what is allowed to the federal Jove is not allowed by it. Mistakes by "little people" are considered criminal.
The present situation, though, is that the gun shop's defenders quite legally took pictures of the ATFE's pernicious "auditors" at "work," published them on the Web, and included their local address. Now, as ATFE constantly claims, if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear (when, for example, completing confusing forms "under penalty of perjury"). Yet, virtually soiling themselves in terror, ATFE demanded penalties against the store because this publicity purportedly exposed their employees to attack.
Now, why did they think that? Because that's how ATFE would respond to "identification" of a firearm owner - with perjured warrants and a murderous SWAT raid, with the intent of beating, killing, or at least dispossessing the "identified" individual. ATFE's paranoia is simple projection rooted in its understanding that all ATFE's anti-gun activities are fundamentally unconstitutional, hence illegal, and subject to eventual criminal sanctions.
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