Word: atf
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...DETROIT COMPUTER BULLETIN board lists the names of local agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and offers helpful advice on how to harass them. A licensed gun dealer, required to surrender his business records to ATF's national tracing center, coated them first with rat excrement. A flyer found posted in Pennsylvania reads WANTED: ATF AGENT. DEAD...
...ATF may be the most hated federal agency in America today, surpassing even the IRS in its notoriety. Gun-rights advocates have demonized the agency as a dark legion of storm troopers who trample the rights of ordinary citizens. Critics have gone so far as to compare its treatment of gun owners to Nazi persecution of Jews during World War II. In a best-selling book published last year, Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association described ATF's disastrous raid at Waco, which began the 51-day siege that ended in conflagration, as "reminiscent of the standoff...
...bureau is not the jackbooted monolith of N.R.A. lore, however. Far from it: court documents and internal reports uncovered in a two-month TIME investigation reveal ATF as a divided and troubled agency far more likely to abuse the rights of its own employees than those of law-abiding citizens. If anything, its internal troubles have impaired its law-enforcement abilities by embroiling agents and managers in a web of in-house scandals and divisive controversies. The agency faces a class action by black agents who claim widespread discrimination and intimidation, including the posting at one office of a "State...
...decades of outside scrutiny and persistent threats to its survival have so cowed the bureau that it now shies from certain categories of investigations, including probes of licensed gun dealers. Instead the ATF focuses more on such politically safe targets as crack gangs, outlaw bikers and ordinary killers. One indicator: the number of firearms ATF has taken into custody dropped 27%, to 12,965, from 1992 to 1994. Of those guns, 6,261 were handguns, or about three for each of the bureau's 2,000 agents. An ATF spokesman says such fluctuations are meaningless, but Kay Kubicki, a former...
...mired in internal crisis, on Wednesday will have to weather new congressional hearings into the 1993 federal siege in which 91 people died near Waco, Texas. TIME's Elaine Shannon reports that two GOP-dominated House committees plan to begin eight days of testimony by examining whether the ATF should have targeted the Branch Davidian compound in the first place. "It's hard to find anybody in Washington who thinks they did," she says. "The Clinton Administration cannot come out of this looking very good, since the Branch Davidians died in circumstances that will remain murky." But Republicans, some...