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From Gunrunner to Gun-Grabber

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On June 30th, Maryland Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings assembled gun confiscation advocates and Second Amendment foes from across the nation to approach the Project Gunrunner/Fast and Furious debacle by doing what the Left does best: changing the subject.

As it is not in the nature of liberals to allow truth to interfere with their agenda, the Congressman decided to ignore the fact that members of the Obama regime’s ATF had directed the sale of thousands of weapons to drug cartel straw buyers and assisted in trafficking those guns across the Mexican border.

Instead, Cummings claimed that “no legitimate examination of [drug cartel violence and illegal firearms trafficking] will be complete without analyzing our nation’s gun laws, which allow tens of thousands of assault weapons to flood into Mexico from the United States each year.”

It apparently escaped the Congressman’s notice that it was President Obama’s ATF and DOJ that fractured those gun laws and caused a flood of weapons across the border in the first place.

So, with the embarrassing facts of Project Gunrunner properly shoved under the table, the Cummings Forum offered the following recommendations to halt the flow of arms across the border:

Increase the penalties for illegal straw purchases;
Enact a dedicated firearms trafficking statute;
Implement a multiple long gun sales reporting requirement.The unabridged Federal Guide to Gun Laws is 400 pages long. Everything illegal about gun manufacture, import, purchase, use, ownership or sale is already “on the books.”
For example, lying on the federal form required to purchase a weapon carries a penalty of “not more than 5 years” in prison. A straw purchaser can be sentenced to 5 years for EVERY gun he purchases and then delivers to someone else for their use. (3)

Read More at Floyd Reports by Doug Book, Floyd Reports

Issa staffer: Gunrunner investigation points much higher than ATF director

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A spokesman for House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa told The Daily Caller the congressman expects his investigations into the Justice Department’s gun walking programs to point to a much higher political appointee than acting ATF director Kenneth Melson.

Melson is widely expected to resign some time in the next couple of days in the face of political pressure from Issa’s investigations into Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast Furious.

Even if Melson resigns, Issa spokesman Frederick Hill said the Committee expects to find much more and continue with investigations.

“The investigations are far from over,” Hill told TheDC. “It’s quite certain that Kenneth Melson was not the principal architect of this plan nor was he the only high-ranking official who knew about and authorized this operation.”

Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious were programs that involved ATF officials allowing guns to be taken into Mexico with the ultimate apparent goal of tracking the larger Mexican drug cartels’ arms market.

Read More at the Daily Caller By Matthew Boyle, the Daily Caller

Issa Investigates Project Gunrunner

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Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) is set to issue a number of subpoenas to federal officials who have ties to “Fast and Furious,” a secret program run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that put thousands of semi-automatic firearms into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

Fast and Furious was a new addition to the ATF’s now-defunct “Project Gunrunner” program. It authorized (“pressed” is probably a more accurate word) U.S. gun stores located near the Mexican border to sell thousands of semi-automatic firearms to suspected and known straw-purchasers (those who buy guns for someone who can’t do so legally). The idea, apparently, was that the guns would lead the ATF to the heads of the cartels.

This program didn’t make headlines until Dec. 14, 2010. That day, during a late-night shootout between the U.S. Border Patrol and armed Mexican illegals in a remote canyon near Nogales, Ariz., 41-year-old federal agent Brian Terry was shot and killed. The U.S. Border Patrol agents had initially used beanbag rounds against the illegals. This loss of a federal agent in a beanbag-versus-rifle shootout should have been controversial enough — but the fact that agent Terry was killed by a firearm the ATF had “walked” across the border should have put this ill-considered program on every cable news network. Ditto for the fact that, as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, a cartel arsenal recently captured in Mexico also contains guns from the sting.

But aside from CBS News, the mainstream media hasn’t been all that interested in investigating, and the Obama administration has been stonewalling. Two ATF agents — John Dodson, who is stationed in Phoenix, and Darren Gil, who was forced to retire as the agency’s attaché in Mexico City — became whistleblowers. Both Dodson and Gil have made the scandal public by speaking to CBS and other news outlets. Both agents say the orders for the program to send guns quietly into Mexico came from way over their heads, but neither knows how high up. Just where the idea began is what Representative Issa is hoping to discover.

Representative Issa’s investigation has been so stymied by the Obama administration that on June 3, some 31 congressional Democrats wrote to the president to urge him to end the administration’s stonewalling on the Fast and Furious program. In the letter, spearheaded by Rep. Jason Altmire (D., Pa.), the lawmakers called the uncooperative tactics “extremely troubling” and found the Justice Department’s failure to provide information to congressional investigators “equally troubling.” They say Americans deserve “prompt and complete answers.”

Read More at National Review By Frank Miniter, National Review