Home // Awful Officials // Fast and Furious scandal looks increasingly like a plot from a bad novel

Fast and Furious scandal looks increasingly like a plot from a bad novel

“ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called ‘Demand Letter 3’. That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or ‘long guns.’ Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.”

That’s what CBS is reporting today, in the latest news on the Fast and Furious scandal, in which ATF agents leaned on gun dealers to sell weapons to obvious criminals to … see what would happen? That’s what it seemed like at first, anyway. Of course, what happened is that some of the guns — whoopsies! — were used in murders.

Now, it seems, there was another purpose behind Fast and Furious. According to emails exchanged by ATF officials themselves, the ATF applied pressure to gun dealers to continue sales with which the gun dealers were uncomfortable so that they could point to the purchase of guns by Mexican drug dealers as evidence that further legal restrictions were required on the sale of firearms.

Y’know, if I wrote a novel with this as a storyline, I’d be accused of paranoia and unrealistic plotting.

Posted in Awful Officials, Right to Bear Arms

2 Comments

  • When you compare F&F with novels like Unintended Consequences, you realize that it’s impossible to write fiction about the BATF that is more outrageous than real life.

    Case in point: despite F&F blowing up in their faces, all the way up to ongoing congressional investigations, BATF *still* rammed through “Demand Letter 3” AFTERWARDS, with no justification at all. As Aesop observed, any excuse will serve a tyrant — including no excuse.

  • And what of recent allegations that the DEA was assisting in the laundering of narco-profits…?

    As I often say: the War on (some) Drugs works – it works like this.

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