Word: atf
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...early days, according to some current and retired agents, ATF often overstepped its bounds. The gun laws were full of opportunities for making felony cases against otherwise solid citizens accustomed to America's wide-open gun trade. At the same time, the arrival of serious gun control in the 1968 Gun Control Act radicalized the N.R.A., prompting the association to shift its emphasis from promoting marksmanship to gutting the act and harrying the enforcers. In 1980 the N.R.A. produced a film, It Can't Happen Here, in which Representative John Dingell of Michigan, then a member of the N.R.A...
...RISING TORRENT of anti-ATF rhetoric has nurtured the perception that ATF agents are justifiable targets for heckling, if not outright assassination, an attitude that Ron Noble, Under Secretary of the Treasury for enforcement, likens to the 1960s protest ethos that branded all police officers "pigs." ATF's opponents, he says, don't loathe the bureau itself, just the laws it must enforce. "So what do you do?" he asks. "You attack an agency that not very many people know a lot about." Says a supervisory agent: "If you can't get the laws overturned, you pound on the agents...
...strategy is working. ATF agents often quote a maxim: "Big cases, big problems; no cases, no problems." The intense and well-orchestrated opposition has succeeded in discouraging ATF from aggressively pursuing investigations of gun shows, flea markets and licensed gun dealers, even though these often prove to be major conduits for the diversion of guns to criminals. The bureau's reluctance to investigate dealers has long driven agents to jokingly describe a dealer's license as "the $10 immunity." (Until two years ago, the annual licensing fee was $10.) A series of standing ATF orders closely choreographs all such investigations...
...FROM CRACKING DOWN, ATF allowed the number of licensed gun dealers to swell to nearly 300,000 by 1993. Often it failed to conduct thorough background checks for prior criminal offenses. In a survey it found that 72% of its licensed dealers never even bothered to open a bona fide store, but operated instead from their homes. Under Magaw, however, the bureau has lately got much tougher on applicants, requiring for the first time that they submit fingerprints and a photograph. Now the number of dealers is falling at a rate of 150 dealers a day, an ATF spokesman says...
...outside attack also helped create a culture in which senior managers and agents face each other across a vast reservoir of distrust and hostility, according to hundreds of pages of internal reports and court documents reviewed by Time. Rank-and-file agents have long protested how managers use ATF's internal-affairs unit, which routinely conducts three to five times as many internal probes as the Secret Service's apparatus, even though each agency has roughly 4,000 employees. Magaw explains the differential as partly because of the fact that ATF agents conduct far more gritty street investigations and thus...