Word: atf
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...N.R.A. IS BEYOND DOUBT THE ATF'S most committed opponent. Over the years the 3.5 million-member organization has built an infrastructure to ensure that far-flung cases of alleged ATF abuse get direct scrutiny from Congress. The organization is relentless. "The natural enemy of a gopher is a rattlesnake," says Gerry Spence, the flamboyant Wyoming defense attorney who defended Randy Weaver after the federal siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. "The natural enemy of the N.R.A. is the ATF...
...N.R.A.'s favorite strategy in harrying the agency is to publicize individual cases of alleged ATF abuses, in the process ignoring the thousands of investigations that conform even to the N.R.A.'s own anticrime platform. In 1994 ATF recommended 10,000 defendants for prosecution, of whom 47% were previously convicted felons. The bureau's critics also sidestep the fact that on the same day as the Waco raid, an ATF investigator, working with a New York City bomb-squad detective, found the vital shard of evidence that broke the World Trade Center bombing case. Agents from the bureau's office...
...N.R.A.'s atrocity stories typically omit details that might muddy its anti-ATF message. High on its list, for example, is the Randy Weaver case. In January 1991, ATF agents arrested Weaver for having sold two sawed-off shotguns to an ATF informant. Weaver was released on his own recognizance. When he failed to appear in court, a fugitive warrant was issued, and the case was passed to the U.S. Marshals Service, which caught up with Weaver in August 1992. A gunfight followed in which a deputy U.S. marshal and Weaver's 14-year-old son were killed...
...regulating three of the nation's most popular yet dangerous products: booze, cigarettes and guns. Its forebears include the "revenuers" who hunted moonshiners and enforced Prohibition. Eliot Ness remains the bureau's chief institutional hero. Today large framed posters from the 1987 movie The Untouchables hang in many ATF offices...
...keep records of who bought their firearms. This new authority delighted the agents, who felt they had been promoted to real crime fighters, but top IRS officials viewed the combined role of tax collection and gun control as a public relations nightmare. So in 1972 the Treasury spun off ATF into a free-standing bureau...