Posted on 03/17/2023 8:26:03 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The federal government has been using Americans’ income and gun purchases to conduct warrantless tracking and deny Second Amendment rights. Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) gave salary estimates to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as the reason to have people’s firearms purchases monitored.
Erich Pratt, senior vice president of Gun Owners of America (GOA), told The Epoch Times that the ATF’s activities “monitoring innocent people” is a serious problem. “Congress needs to rein in this rogue agency by either exercising oversight over it or abolishing the unconstitutional agency altogether,” said Pratt.
These revelations come from new documents, viewed by The Epoch Times which it received from its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The latest production from the FOIA has hundreds of pages—many redacted—showing ATF agents requesting warrantless surveillance by the FBI for lawful reasons such as low salaries, past firearm purchases, and sending “bizarre” messages.
The Epoch Times exclusively reported in January about the FBI’s secret monitoring service that tracks people by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) for gun purchases for mere “potential violations of law.”
According to the documents, a man in Arizona was put into the NICS’s daily monitoring because he has a “reported income” of only $2,839. The ATF agent wrote, “In my experience, someone with this amount of income would not be able to afford 20 firearms.”
An Asian man in Texas was put on the manual background check because the ATF said he has “no work history” which “could possibly indicate” that he is “straw purchasing.”
A special agent in Kansas emailed ATF’s liaison at the NICS to flag two purchasers for “potential trafficking.” The agent wrote: “My targets are purchasing an abundance of firearms without a license or known financial means to obtain the product.”
The FBI’s NICS expert instructed the agent in Kansas on what to include to ensure approval for tracking the suspects. “I would suggest covering the lack of income versus expenditures and also if there is substantial make/model duplication,” wrote the FBI. The ATF agent emailed back with the incomes for each man, acquired by the Kansas Department of Labor.
All the cases in the documents are related to the ATF investigating dealing firearms without a license and straw purchasing, which is buying guns for people prohibited from owning a firearm.
Gun rights activists say federal law enforcement is missing the mark.
“The poor usually live in areas with the most crime and thus have a strong need to arm themselves heavily,” Pratt said. “So targeting the indigent is simply another avenue for gun grabbers to implement a backdoor gun ban.”
ATF headquarters will not disclose how it acquired the other suspects’ incomes, employment information, and past gun purchases found in the FOIA forms.
“We are unable to discuss specific techniques utilized in criminal investigations,” ATF spokesman Erik Longnecker told The Epoch Times. “ATF utilizes a multitude of legal means in our criminal investigations to protect our communities from violent gun crime.”
Longnecker referred The Epoch Times to the National Tracing Center website for information about “several overt programs such as multiple sales and demand letters that can be helpful in identifying illegal firearms trafficking.”
A black man in Florida was monitored daily by the FBI for at least 90 days in 2020 because an ATF agent wrote: “Based on my training and experience, I have not seen a legal firearms purchaser purchase approximately 30 firearms in a 120-day window for their personal collection.”
Read more here...
The whole of the ATF needs to go away. Anyone who wasn’t a janitor or somesuch should probably end up unemployable.
And who the Chief Executive in 2020?
The Communist Attempt To Purge All Guns Continues To Grow Exponentially & Nothing Is Being Done About It!
Which is why since the Brady Bill became law way back in the 1990’s I will ONLY buy from individuals and I always pay cash.
One more agency that needs to go, and it’s management
to be investigated, charged, prosecuted, and sent to
prison.
Defund and disband.
“And who the Chief Executive in 2020? ”
—————-
Why is that relevant to anything? Do you think that Trump knew what ATF was doing to a particular person, let alone ordered it? You never heard of rogue agents or agencies - meaning that they have their own agendas and intentionally violate policy for their own reasons?
You wouldn't happen to know which president ordered the ATF to unconstitutionally ban bump stocks would you ?
Asking for a friend.
So with Trump, the buck always stops elsewhere. Trump is the captain who never goes down with his ship because, contrary to agency law and hundreds of years of jurisprudence, Trump, as chief executive, is not and never responsible.
Then take it to court and prove it was unconstitutional. Your saying so doesn’t make it so
Of course Trump wasn’t president then so it could be that
Do you believe FBI/ATF field agents report their daily activities to POTUS? You would have to be a special kind of stupid to believe that.
Yep, it looks like you are that special kind of stupid.
Time for the ATF and other agencies to go away - they have become the organized crime cabals they were originally instituted to stop...
So you are saying that it's okay to use government agencies to bypass the Constitution as long as Trump does it ?
And as for "attacking the messenger", Appeals Court strikes down bump stocks ban.
Trump was President from January 20, 2017 - January 20, 2021. So in fact he was President in 2020, despite your delusions to the contrary.
Oh and I’m sure in the last weeks at the WH he was busy ordering agencies to trash the American people
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