Effort to stem flow of firearms to Mexico backfires

ATF agent and whistle-blower John Dodson said Tuesday. “Those guns are gone — gone. You can’t just give the order and get them back. There is no telling how many previous crimes will be committed before we get to them.”

Privately, ATF agents say Gunrunner “was out of control” and deserved to be shut down. The mistakes made were not intentional and they say there are no limits to the number of long guns (as opposed to pistols or revolvers) a person is allowed to buy.

Therefore, while gun stores had the freedom to sell as many guns as they wanted to any single buyer, at no time did agents tell owners to ‘break the law.’

Already sources say those guns can be traced to hundreds of robberies, rapes, and murders. Critics say ATF knowingly allowed those sales to take place and failed to make arrests of known smugglers, thereby intercepting the guns before they crossed the border.

“They would tell us — we would say — ‘do you want us to stop selling?…is there something we should do here? and they would say “No, no, no — continue selling — just tell us after the fact,” said Brad Desaye, owner of J & G Gun Sales in Prescott, Arizona.

J&G sold sixty guns to alleged straw buyers. ATF agents told him on the phone and in person to let the sales happen.

Dodson, one of seven agents on the Gunrunner task force, confirms that ATF knowingly allowed the sales and did not actively track the weapons, as in a traditional investigation. Instead, it allowed the guns to go south, where they were used in crimes or seized by Mexican police during raids.

Until now, administration officials blamed Mexico’s drug violence on Arizona and border state gun shops, repeatedly claiming that 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico were sold in the United States.

Now, Desaye says, “the truth is coming out. It’s becoming obvious the largest supplier to Mexican gun violence is ATF, not the dealers. And they are using us as scapegoats.”

Senator Grassley says ATF is not the only guilty agency. He says Department of Justice lawyers and agents from DHS also watched this debacle unfold, often hand in hand with ATF.

Grassley has lengthy correspondence and numerous documents he wants to post on the Senate Judiciary website, but sources on the Hill say Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy would not allow it, refusing to call for an independent congressional investigation.

As the scandal began to draw more media attention, the chief of Public Affairs at the ATF in Washington issued this memo 28 February to media relations staff throughout the agency..

“ATF needs to proactively push positive stories this week in an effort to preempt some negative reporting, or at a minimum lessen the coverage of (Project Gunrunner) in the news cycle by replacing them with good stories about the ATF.”

On Wednesday, the National Rifle Association also called for expedited congressional hearings on firearms trafficking enforcement tactics used by the ATF.