Sullivan’s nomination was blocked by a Senate hold placed by none other than Republican senators David Vitter, best known for his involvement in the 2007 DC Madam scandal, Larry E. Craig, arrested for lewd conduct (“I have a wide stance”) in a Minneapolis-St. Paul men’s room, and Michael Crapo, a professed Mormon, arrested for DUI in 2012 and whose driver’s license is still suspended, along with any action on confirming a permanent head of the ATF. President Obama nominated Andrew Traver to be director of the ATF but that nomination stalled in the Senate last year. Currently the ATF is led by B. Todd Jones as interim director. Obama intends to nominate him to lead the Bureau, but opponents are already lining up against him. In the meantime, he is doing the best he can with the little he’s been given to work with. As Erica Goode and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in the New York Times, “The agency’s ability to thwart gun violence is hamstrung by legislative restrictions and by loopholes in federal gun laws...For example, under current laws the bureau is prohibited from creating a federal registry of gun transactions.”The ATF must do its work trying to trace guns manually, because the NRA has been nothing less than belligerent in its opposition to the ATF entering the digital age.And the ATF gets short shrift when it comes to funding. Again quoting Goode and Stolberg, "While other law enforcement agencies like the FBI have benefited from greatly increased budgets and staffing, the ATF’s budget has remained largely stagnant, increasing to about $1.1 billion in the 2012 fiscal year from just over $850 million a decade ago.”The ATF has fewer agents today than it did 4 decades ago. According to Sari Horwitz, writing for the Washington Post, “The agency, which has a budget of about $1.1 billion, is charged with investigating gun trafficking and regulating firearms sales. However, it is able to inspect only a fraction of the nation’s 60,000 retail gun dealers each year, with as much as eight years between visits to stores.”In an earlier post, I said that for the NRA,” the slaughter of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, along with the 6 adults who tried to protect them, was collateral damage, just as is the 1318 reported gun deaths so far since Newtown.”That post was way back on January 28, 2013; all of twenty-eight days ago. We’ve had another 953 gun deaths since then, so the count now is 2271. Without an effective ATF, the count will keep going up and up and up, no matter what new laws are introduced.SUPPORT GUN CONTROL
Sullivan’s nomination was blocked by a Senate hold placed by none other than Republican senators David Vitter, best known for his involvement in the 2007 DC Madam scandal, Larry E. Craig, arrested for lewd conduct (“I have a wide stance”) in a Minneapolis-St. Paul men’s room, and Michael Crapo, a professed Mormon, arrested for DUI in 2012 and whose driver’s license is still suspended, along with any action on confirming a permanent head of the ATF. President Obama nominated Andrew Traver to be director of the ATF but that nomination stalled in the Senate last year. Currently the ATF is led by B. Todd Jones as interim director. Obama intends to nominate him to lead the Bureau, but opponents are already lining up against him. In the meantime, he is doing the best he can with the little he’s been given to work with. As Erica Goode and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in the New York Times, “The agency’s ability to thwart gun violence is hamstrung by legislative restrictions and by loopholes in federal gun laws...For example, under current laws the bureau is prohibited from creating a federal registry of gun transactions.”The ATF must do its work trying to trace guns manually, because the NRA has been nothing less than belligerent in its opposition to the ATF entering the digital age.And the ATF gets short shrift when it comes to funding. Again quoting Goode and Stolberg, "While other law enforcement agencies like the FBI have benefited from greatly increased budgets and staffing, the ATF’s budget has remained largely stagnant, increasing to about $1.1 billion in the 2012 fiscal year from just over $850 million a decade ago.”The ATF has fewer agents today than it did 4 decades ago. According to Sari Horwitz, writing for the Washington Post, “The agency, which has a budget of about $1.1 billion, is charged with investigating gun trafficking and regulating firearms sales. However, it is able to inspect only a fraction of the nation’s 60,000 retail gun dealers each year, with as much as eight years between visits to stores.”In an earlier post, I said that for the NRA,” the slaughter of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, along with the 6 adults who tried to protect them, was collateral damage, just as is the 1318 reported gun deaths so far since Newtown.”That post was way back on January 28, 2013; all of twenty-eight days ago. We’ve had another 953 gun deaths since then, so the count now is 2271. Without an effective ATF, the count will keep going up and up and up, no matter what new laws are introduced.SUPPORT GUN CONTROL