Free Republic

·11250 Waples Mill Road ·   Fairfax, Virginia 22030    ·800-392-8683   Federal Court Upholds Obama/Holder Gun Registration Scheme; Congressional Action Needed   Friday, January 13, 2012   Moments before this alert was to go out, a federal district court in Washington, D.C. issued a ruling upholding an Obama administration policy that requires federally licensed firearms retailers in states bordering Mexico to report multiple sales of semi-automatic rifles.  The case was brought by two NRA-backed firearms retailers and by the National Shooting Sports Foundation acting on behalf of its affected members.  Plaintiffs plan to appeal immediately—but in the meantime, your help is urgently...

Election season is here, and you might think President Obama would be going out of his way to show voters that he can be trusted with the powers of the presidency. But you would be wrong. Just a few days before Christmas, Obama served notice to all Americans that he will continue to abuse executive privilege by seeking new ways to vilify gun owners and further his anti-gun agenda. Congress placed a provision in the $1 trillion omnibus spending bill for 2012 designed to bar the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from using any of its $30.7 billion taxpayer funds...

Discovery of a January, 2011 email exchange between then Acting ATF Director Ken Melson and the Bureau’s chief council Steve Rubenstein has put the kibosh on Obama Administration elites’ latest “we didn’t know about it” defense concerning Regime involvement in Operation Fast and Furious. On December 22 of 2010, a contributor identifying himself as “1desertrat” posted the following to the “CLEANUP ATF” website: “Word is that curious George Gillett the Phoenix ASAC stepped on it again. Allegedly he has approved more than 500 AR-15 type rifles from Tucson and Phoenix cases to be “walked” to Mexico. Appears that ATF may...

Gun Rights Examiner and Sipsey Street Irregulars received information this evening that three of the prime Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives players in the Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal have been relieved of duties. William Hoover, ATF's Deputy Director during Fast and Furious, who was recently reassigned as Special Agent in Charge of the Washington Field Office, Assistant Director in Charge of Field Operations Mark Chait, likewise reassigned as head of the Baltimore Field Office, and Deputy Assistant Director of Field Operations William McMahon have reportedly been sidelined pending the outcome of the anticipated report from the Office...

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is in charge of determining whether a gun model is legal, but the agency won’t say much about its criteria. Despite overseeing an industry that includes machine guns and other deadly weapons, ATF regulations for the manufacture of weapons are often unclear, leading to reliance on a secretive system by which firearms manufacturers can submit proposed weapons for testing and find out one at a time whether they comply with the law, critics say. The ATF recommends that manufacturers voluntarily submit weapons for case-by-case determination. But those judgments are private and, it...

Had the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in February of 1995 acted upon an its expressed determination to arrest a German national who had overstayed his visa, the Oklahoma City bombing might not have taken place. While the show trial of Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh was being conducted at Denver, Colorado in April of 1997, another federal proceeding was taking place in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But no one seemed particularly interested in this case–the federal prosecution of former beauty queen and Oklahoma debutante Carol Howe for making bomb threats against the government of the United States. No one, that...

In all of my years fighting on behalf of the National Rifle Association to defend the Second Amendment, I never thought I would see a White House so vehemently opposed to gun ownership that it would be willing to arm violent criminals and endanger American lives in pursuit of a gun control agenda. Readers will recall that a little over two months ago, in this same space, I wrote: "I would like to believe that President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder – no matter how much they oppose our Second Amendment rights – would never break the law...

It was a very uncomfortable Thursday for Attorney General Eric Holder on Capitol Hill as he testified before the House Judiciary Committee about Operation Fast and Furious. If it wasn’t clear that Fast and Furious was implemented as a way to push more gun control measures without the consent of Congress, it’s crystal clear now. Continued stonewalling from the Justice Department had Rep. James Sensenbrenner talking about impeachment Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers called for the enforcement of new gun control measures pushed through the Justice Department in July without the approval of Congress, requiring...

Scandal: Newly obtained documents show that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives discussed using its covert operation Fast and Furious to argue for new rules about gun sales. We told you so. As we observed in June, the way Fast and Furious — the government's gun-running operation that resulted in the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry — was conducted made no sense unless its intent was to facilitate violence with U.S. weapons in the interests of pursuing the administration's gun-control agenda. Now documents obtained by CBS News confirm that our first suspicions were correct. As CBS'...

Documents obtained by CBS News show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using their covert operation "Fast and Furious" to argue for controversial new rules about gun sales. PICTURES: ATF "Gunwalking" scandal timeline In Fast and Furious, ATF secretly encouraged gun dealers to sell to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels to go after the "big fish." But ATF whistleblowers told CBS News and Congress it was a dangerous practice called "gunwalking," and it put thousands of weapons on the street. Many were used in violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Those of you at the Sullivan Group out in Sacramento, my opinion auditing firm, you better listen up. I gotta go up now, I gotta go up above 99.6. I mean Fast and Furious, right on the money, I called it. Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News, found evidence in the e-mails that the whole plan was about affecting gun laws in this country, exactly as I prognosticated all the way back on July 7th of this year. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I take you back to this program. This is me on July 7th of this year. RUSH ARCHIVE:...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department has provided Congress with 1,364 pages of documents detailing how the department gave inaccurate information to a U.S. senator in the controversy surrounding Operation Fast and Furious, the flawed law enforcement initiative aimed at dismantling major arms trafficking networks on the Southwest border. In a letter last February to Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had not knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser

Item 1: In March of 2011, President Obama denied knowledge of 'Operation Fast and Furious' -- the Justice Department program that sent thousands of murder weapons to Mexican drug cartels. 25 March 2011 - Under fire for an operation that allowed smuggling of U.S. weapons across the nation’s border with Mexico, President Obama said in an interview that neither he nor Attorney General Eric Holder authorized the controversial “Operation Fast and Furious.” ...Obama told Univision‘s Jorge Ramos that President Felipe Calderon wasn’t informed of the operation because he — the president of the United States — wasn’t informed either. When...

You gotta hand it to those overachievers at the ATF(E and sometimes RBFs). Up to their asses in alligators over Fast & Furious, called in to investigate a local law enforcement peccadillo, and yet they still find time to reach out and touch someone(s). In this case, the someones would be those buyers who made the faux pas of buying more than one gun inside a five-day period. So how does this new Community Outreach Program work?

David Codrea published an article today about an interesting letter one law abiding silencer owner received from the ATF. The silencer owner in question owns an AWC .22lr silencer that uses a material made of tangled copper ropes to slow down the expanding gasses, a material not unlike the common Brillo pad or Chore Boy Pot Scrubber. He wanted to know whether it would be legal to replace the worn out material in his legally owned silencer with some pot scrubber material, an act which seems pretty innocuous to the impartial observer. The ATF, on the other hand… From the...

During a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing today on Capitol Hill, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, who is facing pressure surrounding his role in the Obama Justice Department’s Operation Fast and Furious, asked for more gun control and blamed law abiding gun shop owners for violence in Mexico. Breuer declared that nearly 70 percent of guns found in Mexico come from the United States, a figure that has been disproven by the National Rifle Association, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and by Senator Charles Grassley’s office multiple times.  Also during testimony, Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein pushed for more gun control and Breuer expressed his...

Article For Immediate Release October 31, 2011 New Gun Walking Documents Show Criminal Division Knew More than Previous Acknowledged Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley made the following statement after the Justice Department provided more than 650 pages of documents related to the congressional inquiry into Operation Fast and Furious.  Grassley has been conducting oversight of the strategy since January. “There are 652 pages of documents that our investigators will scour over the next several days, beyond the few that the Justice Department pointed out.  At first glance, though, the documents indicate that contrary to previous denials by...

On March 30, the 30th anniversary of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, Jim Brady, who sustained a debilitating head wound in the attack, and his wife, Sarah, came to Capitol Hill to push for a ban on the controversial “large magazines.” Brady, for whom the law requiring background checks on handgun purchasers is named, then met with White House press secretary Jay Carney. During the meeting, President Obama dropped in and, according to Sarah Brady, brought up the issue of gun control, “to fill us in that it was very much on his agenda,” she said. “I just...

Was the new acting director of ATF involved at the inception of the criminal gunwalking scandal known as Operation Fast & Furious? The appointment of B. Todd Jones as acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, hasn't caused much of a ripple – in the media or in the ATF. By most accounts Jones is a stand-up guy, ex-Marine, and in a refreshing change of pace, apparently not known for ignominious bouts of bad judgment. But who your friends are generally says a lot about you, and Todd Jones is a longtime friend and...

"It was a joint operation in which DEA knew more than ATF." It was a brutal weekend for the Obama administration: Gunwalker continued unraveling at a faster pace, with new developments suggesting that Attorney General Eric Holder may not be the only Obama appointee destined for a political fall and possible criminal charges. In an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa revealed for the first time that the Drug Enforcement Administration was far more involved in running the operation than the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives: It...