Want to read an article about gun violence which contains so many misstatements that it qualifies as ‘fake news?’ Try the article published in The New York Times about Joe’s decision to appoint David Chipman to run the ATF.

              I have nothing against Chipman. He and I have talked several times, and he’s a decent, stand-up guy. He retired from ATF and now does a gig with Gabby’s gun-control group.  He’s hardly the ‘fiery’ former agent that the NYT claims him to be.

              The inaccuracies in the NYT article run much deeper than whether they have created a false impression about David Chipman. The bottom line is that this article simply doesn’t show the slightest understanding of what the ATF has done or hasn’t done about gun violence over the last nearly fifty years.

              The ATF was assigned its current regulatory role over guns in the government’s most sweeping gun law to date – the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA68). The agency enforces the regulation of gun commerce, i.e., the interstate movement of guns. This happens to be the proper role of all federal regulatory agencies, whether the agency regulates the interstate movement of guns, cigarettes, money, potato chips, or anything else.

              Meanwhile, even though just about every gun which is used in an act of gun violence crossed a state line at some point in time, the control of gun violence, at the point where gun violence actually occurs, is left up to the individual states. That’s what federalism is all about, right?

              The GCA68 preamble says the law is intended to help law-enforcement agencies do a better job of dealing with crime. So, the ATF, from its very beginnings in the gun thing, operates in a kind of no-man’s land. The agency’s only statutory authority is to make sure that the behavior of the individuals who engage in gun commerce – manufacturers, wholesalers, dealers – follow the rules which define how guns move legally from one state to another state. When it comes to guns being used to commit gun violence, such events have little to do with the activities of the ATF at all.

              My gun shop was inspected by the ATF in 2014. Three agents from the regulatory division showed up and examined the paperwork covering more than several thousand transactions which had occurred in my shop over the previous years. At the end of this exercise, which went on for several months and involved at least a dozen separate visits to my shop, I couldn’t produce the requisite paperwork on the sale of – ready? – three guns.

              To complete the inspection, I had to call the ‘stolen-missing gun’ lady at the ATF’s Atlanta office, give her the serial number of those three guns, which she then put on some master list which presumably is used to figure out something about missing or stolen guns.

              One of the three ‘missing’ guns was the frame of an old Mossberg shotgun which couldn’t be fired because it didn’t have a barrel, or a trigger, or a stock. But the frame had a serial number which made it a gun. Another of the ‘missing’ guns was a 22-caliber, Iver Johnson revolver, which was manufactured sometime before World War II.

According to GCA68, my failure to produce the requisite paperwork on these two ‘weapons’ constituted a ‘threat’ to public safety. Such threats are felonies, punishable by up to five years in jail.

The NYT article follows  closely from a long, detailed report on the ATF published by the Center for American Progress (CAP) in 2015. That report was based on interviews with more than 90 staff from the FBI and ATF.  The NYT story was based on interviews with 50 ATF staffers and others. Neither the CAP report, nor the NYT article referenced an interview with a single individual – dealer, wholesaler, manufacturer – whose business activities are regulated by the ATF.

How do you determine the effectiveness of a regulatory agency without talking to at least one person whose entire business activity is controlled by what the regulatory agency does or doesn’t do?

You don’t.

Buy on Amazon: Gun Notes: Research on Guns (Guns in America): Weisser, Michael R.: 9780578453149: Amazon.com: Books