“I share responsibility for mistakes that were made,” said ATF supervisor William G. McMahon about Operation Fast and Furious. (U.S. Congress / August 14, 2011)

- ATF Agent John Dodson, August 2011

Sheepdog or government lapdog?

The promotion of the three primary Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) should come as no surprise.  The government is the entity in everyday life that usually rewards venal, unprofessional and vicious behavior on the part of its apparatchiks because that is the primary means by which government gets things done.  The Fast and Furious Operation was designed as a sting by the ATF to allow straw purchases to flow to Mexico through the border states like Arizona where I live even though it has also been linked to a dozen crime scenes in the US.  This clown posse intended to allow the semi-automatic weapons to get into the hands of the drug cartels so they could be traced and used to identify who was who in the evil narco-conglomerates in the greater failed state known as Mexico.

I use the term failed state in the common patois but as far as I can see it is a wildly successful state �" a government dominated economy rich in agricultural and natural resources squandered by the Soviet-style central planning that has informed Mexican politics since the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) took over in 1929.  The 1917 Constitution was an inspiration for the 1918 Russian Constitution for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.  Even though the PRI lost in 2000, the country continues to be a collectivist cesspool dominated by restriction on the most basic human rights.  It was not until 1992 that Mexico started to extricate the state from religion and lifted severe restrictions.  By Communist standards, Mexico is a close approximation of that wretched idea and like China, has been one of those rare Marxoid nations whose territorial ambitions have been rather muted and lazy beyond their contiguous borders.  I would suggest part of this lies in the unique brand of military incompetency that places Mexico among the worst armed forces in the history of mankind, a circumstance that has greatly benefitted America’s yen for expansion into the southwestern portion of North America.

The ATF conducted their bumbling operation without even informing the American embassy in Mexico City which later came to bite them badly.  Let’s step back a moment.  A straw purchase is a violation of American gun laws because it allegedly permits a potential felon or other ineligible owner of firearms to get a firearm by having another person purchases it for them much like the idiotic alcohol consumption laws in America where an adult will purchase beer or wine or liquor for someone under age. I have stated before that we don’t need to enforce the 271 Federal gun laws on the books, we need to get rid of them and the thousands of state and local laws this has created such as the urban hellholes like DC and Chicago where gun possession by the lawful is rather problematic but not for criminal who…ahem…break laws for a living. We need to strive to make America number one in gun freedoms and not number nine behind the Khyber Pass, Finland and New Zealand where these countries have no restrictions on suppressors, for instance.

If I were to join the rest of the gun community in condemning the behavior of the ATF, I would be acknowledging that their violation of weapons laws and procedures was a bad event but I will not do that.  Don’t get me wrong, the BATF should not be funded and their very existence is thanks to the need to employ Prohibition-era Treasury agents to switch from alcohol regulation to another regulatory activity to retain them on the G-Man rolls.  Therefore, the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA) became yet another employment opportunity for the state to create malum prohibitum laws out of whole cloth and cloak it in the mantra of public safety.  Soon to be followed by the 1968 Gun Control Act and a whole host of noxious Federal regulations impairing a man’s ability to arm himself with a weapon of his choice; no, I will not speak to the Second Amendment because it is attached to the very document that allowed all these regulations and laws to exist in the first place.  Sort of like waving a title and negotiating with the repo man from the bank as your car is being towed away.  Who will he listen to?

Are these three supervisors along with the head of the BATF part and parcel of a thugocracy and clearly illegitimate Federal agency?  Of course.  Notice I did not employ the silly phrase “rogue agency”?  Every last one of them are nothing more than tax and debt subsidized enforcement divisions whose sin qua non is the maintenance and expansion of government power and the reduction and elimination of private volition.  Nothing more and nothing less.

In the end, Operation Fast and Furious initiated a program that should be a natural part of commerce absent any regulation.  Think of it this way, the straw purchase is a legal fiction which assumes the government should have the ability to deny anyone it deems ineligible to arm and protect themselves even though it is absolved of any necessity nor impetus to provide protection for individual citizens, therefore leaving even violent felons in the hazard for protecting themselves. Of course, we know according to the government’s own statistics, only eight percent of the population in America’s federal penal colony is for violent offenders.

What goes unmentioned is the historical arms relationship between the US government and the Mexican armed forces and constabulary.  Everything from armored vehicles to thousands of weapons and millions of rounds has been transferred with the blessing of the US DoD and State Department.  One would imagine that the pristine reputation of Mexico for lack of corruption would insure these items never fell into the wrong hands of the narco-cartels who are a wholly owned subsidiary and creation of the US War against Altering Your Own Consciousness otherwise known as the War against Prohibited Vegetable Matter and Extracts.

So let’s review.  The US government declares a war on drugs and guns, it goes on to create a linkage between the two in the underground economy in Mexico that serves the seemingly insatiable market for these prohibited items in these united States.  The prohibition on drugs creates virtual shadow governments out of the drug cartels due to the tremendous monetary assets and violence methodologies they seem to wield.  The BATF is convinced that they alone can finger and nail all the bad actors in the illegal drug cartels by allowing US domestic buyers to break the law and make straw purchases for persons otherwise ineligible for purchasing firearms from Federal Firearms License dealers sanctioned by the BATF across the fruited plain.  We do know that the other clown posse, the DEA, was also complicit in the ill-fated operation. The DEA was even actively strengthening the Sinaloa cartel.  They allow said firearms purchase to penetrate the porous southern border with Mexico.  They are then surprised that the intelligence yield is negligible and they cannot account for 1,048 of the 1,418 (page 60) illegally purchased according to the clown posse at the BATF.  The strategy is to hire low hanging fruit in the US community with cartel connections and then let them feed the weapons into the pipeline down to Mexico?  Then they lose the trail?  I expect this kind of incompetence and investigative laziness because in the already low expectations of performance in the Federal law enforcement community, the BATF are among the most shabby, scurrilous and violent of all these alphabet agencies that plague the lives of everyday Americans.  They are the hybrid equivalent of Barney Fife and Felix Dzerzhinsky, a nasty brew of armed incompetence bent on enforcing gun laws that should not exist in the first place.

In conclusion, we should never be surprised when people in the government are promoted beyond their competence or rewarded for venal and dishonorable behavior.  These are the purest hallmarks of the political scum that rises to the top of every government enterprise throughout the history of man.  Whether professional politicians or their oily apparatchiks, remember that these are men whose every enterprise demands that they live off the proceeds of others and have the firepower to ensure that this notion of advancement absent merit is ruthlessly enforced.  Fast and Furious and the brilliant minds that crafted the fiasco were merely the latest in a long and prodigious march of the thugocracy and kakocracy that is the American government. They will not see a jail cell because they have badges unlike this woman who faces thirty years in the gulag. When an American lawman crosses the line:

“The three supervisors have been given new management positions at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. They are William G. McMahon, who was the ATF’s deputy director of operations in the West, where the illegal trafficking program was focused, and William D. Newell and David Voth, both field supervisors who oversaw the program out of the agency’s Phoenix office.”

I congratulate all of them and am thankful for a system that burns into American minds daily that we are merely the cattle to ensure that Mr. McMahon can continue to quite literally and figuratively feed at the government trough and be complicit in murder with a get out of jail free card.  The irony is that they skirted and warped laws that should not exist in the first place.  I don’t want any weapons laws whatsoever.  If I condemn the agency for not doing a more effective job enforcing bad laws, what does that make me?

Fast and furious, indeed.

“We stand for organized terror �" this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence. When confronted with evidence criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal’s own confession?”
�" Felix Dzerzhinsky

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