You almost have to feel sorry for Dennis Henigan sometimes. To spend your entire life working on an issue only to watch it circling the bowl the past few years can’t be easy on anyone. It also has to be difficult to try to justify something I have to believe Henigan knows was wrong, but since the Administration’s heart was in the right place, so maybe that’s all the matters in Henigan’s mind. Otherwise, to try to carry the Obama Administration’s dirty water, after everything he hasn’t done for them, just makes you a tool.
I have a difficult time following Henigan’s logic, suggesting that “grievously weak federal gun laws” are to blame here. If our government is going to sanction criminal trafficking of firearms, what federal law is going to make a bit of difference? Henigan suggests,
If dealer sales of assault rifles were restricted, as they were for 10 years until 2004 when Congress and President Bush allowed the federal assault weapon ban to expire, it would not be necessary for law enforcement to track down the guns after they leave the gun shop.
Except in most cases the weapon an issue here is the Krinkov pistol, which were readily available during the ban, because they did not qualify as assault weapons under the federal definition, and most certainly aren’t rifles by any definition. Henigan further asserts,
The Attorney General’s most severe critics even oppose the new ATF rule requiring real-time reporting to ATF when border state dealers sell multiple semi-automatic rifles to a single buyer, a red flag for trafficking. The same members of Congress who denounce ATF for failing to stop trafficked guns from crossing the border into Mexico also oppose a rule that would give ATF the information it needs to arrest the traffickers and interdict the guns, before they get to the border.
Henigan has to be insane if he truly believes the nonsense he’s spewing here. The multiple sales requires accomplishes nothing in terms of interdicting guns. A piece of paper sent to a bureaucrat at ATF is not going to physically intervene and prevent that weapon from being illegally trafficked over the border, or illegally sold to a criminal in this country. Data is worthless if it is not acted on, and to act on it requires significant resources.
Even accepting Henigan’s position that this was a case of “flawed enforcement tactics,” one has to wonder how he expects, given that ATF lacks “the leadership and authority it needs to do its job well,” and was thus unable to track the weapons the dealers were voluntarily telling them about, how it’s going to cope when it gets hundreds of times that data, with the criminal transactions drowning in the noise of the legal ones. Dennis doesn’t mention that in his simplistic and naive analysis.
But the Administration certainly went through a lot of trouble to try to drive up the trace numbers in an attempt to justify bigger budgets and more laws and regulations, so I suppose carrying its water is the least Dennis Henigan can do.
The crazy is strong in this one. Her column actually includes long quotes from a business owner who outlined the risks in hiring new employees – the direct financial risk of how much they will cost, the risk of how much value they will add to the organization, and the increasing hassles and expenses of dealing with various government bureaucracies who control the many aspects of his business. Yet, she cannot accept this simple answer. It’s all a plot to derail Obama. She has no evidence, but that won’t stop the accusations from flying in her paper.
