According to our friends at The Trace, they describe their mission as an “independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to shining a light on America’s gun crisis.” And sometimes they do, such as the series they ran last year on stolen guns, other times they don’t. And the reason they don’t sometimes get it right is because none of their writers have any actual experience in the gun business, which means that when they rely on an ‘expert’ for information about guns, they really have no way of determining whether this so-called expert knows what he’s talking about or not.

Today they have posted a link to an article featuring their ATF expert, who happens to be employed by Gabby’s group.  The expert, whose name is David Chipman, spent 25 years with the ATF, allegedly ‘overseeing’ their firearms programs, whatever that means. If what he said about the ATF‘s tracing activities is based on his oversight of gun programs, no wonder the ATF is such a mess. In a word, what The Trace is relying on from this expert to inform their readers about how the ATF operates, is pure crap. It’s nothing more than a very selective description of ATF tracing which simply bolsters the same, old whining narrative about not enough people, not enough money, not enough this, not enough that.

I love how Chipman begins his bravura performance by referring to the clerks who run around the tracing division as “patriots.”  That’s the tip-off right there because we all know that someone who is a ‘patriot’ is above reproach, right? And why are these people busing their butts to fulfill their patriotic duty? Because the 4473 forms which they collect from non-operating gun dealers are stacked away in cartons and have to be searched by hand. It’s those NRA meanies, recall, who won’t let the ATF out the records on disk and make them instantly searchable – a problem explained by The Trace back in 2015.

Now here’s where, as we used to say in the South, the tailgate drops and the bullshit stops. Because even though Chipman says that more than 2 million new documents arrive every month and are added to the (ready?) 700 million documents already being stored, without a modern, computerized search system, the mind boggles at the idea of looking up data in this vast collection of paper.  And the Trace says that the ATF conducted 373,349 traces in 2015, a number which increased to 407,000 last year. Oh my God. Do this without a computer?  Oh…my…Gawd.

Well, we dropped the tailgate but the bullshit didn’t stop. First, the ATF does not disclose how many traces end up being done by a gun dealer, as opposed to the ATF gang down at the National Tracing Center (NTC.) Since the point of a trace is to determine the identity of the person who bought the gun, without knowing the percentage of traces conducted at NTC, just giving out the total number of traces says nothing about how hard all those patriots are working on all those paper files. The ATF also doesn’t disclose how many traces are ‘urgent’ and must be completed within 24 -48 hours, as opposed to ‘routine’ searches for which the deadline is 10 days. So to pretend that the NTC is deluged every day with traces that must be answered immediately, is simply not true.

Our friends at Johns Hopkins have just published a new study (which I will write about next week) which basically finds no connection between background checks and gun violence rates, even in states which require all transfers to be checked. Huh? I thought that the purpose of tracing, at least according to the ATF, was to give law enforcement agencies ‘critical information’ to help solve gun crimes.

Whether it’s Waco, or Fast & Furious, or Sandy Hook, the ATF has never shown itself capable of conducting a serious investigation that would help us figure out what we really need to do to reduce gun violence. If The Trace wants to really shine a light on gun violence, it might turn a strong beam on the patriots who work for the ATF.

   My take on the ATF. Buy it from Amazon.