(2014)
Sensenbrenner is right: It's time to dissolve the ATF
It's time to
dissolve the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In fact, it should have been dissolved years ago. It has disparate missions that overlap with other agencies' responsibilities. It has been micromanaged by Congress and mismanaged by its leaders. It serves no useful purpose that can't be met by other government bodies. It needs to go.
U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) is working on a bill that would do just that, and we hope this effort is successful.
"By absorbing the ATF into existing law enforcement entities, we can preserve the areas where the ATF adds value for substantially less taxpayer money," Sensenbrenner said. "While searching for its mission, the ATF has been plagued by decades of high-profile blunders...We cannot afford to ignore clear changes that will greatly enhance the government's efficiency."
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's recent "
Backfire" Watchdog Reports investigation uncovered a series of botched undercover storefront stings across the nation. The investigation found that the agency used people with mental disabilities to promote operations and then arrested them; opened storefronts near schools and churches, boosting their arrest numbers and penalties; attracted juveniles with free video games and alcohol; paid inflated prices for guns, prompting people to buy new guns and quickly sell them to agents for a profit; allowed armed felons to leave their fake stores; and openly bought stolen goods, spurring burglaries in surrounding neighborhoods.
The Journal Sentinel also reported that in Milwaukee, the ATF operation was burglarized, four of the wrong people were arrested and an agent's machine gun was stolen. It has not been recovered. That investigation led to a bipartisan call in Congress for accountability.
And accountability in this case should mean eliminating the agency.
While the bungled operations may be new, this is not the first time there has been a call for dissolving the ATF. It was considered for elimination during both former President Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton's terms but was saved, in part, because gun rights groups didn't want its duties moving to another agency, such as the FBI, which might have done a better job of enforcing gun laws.
In 1993, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) introduced a bill to eliminate the ATF, but it didn't pass. About a decade later, a group studying federal law enforcement found that in trying to meet its dual responsibilities, the ATF's missions to collect taxes and regulate private industry "did not contribute to effective enforcement of the nation's gun and explosives laws."
And a decade after that, not much has changed; in fact, the agency may be more dysfunctional now than it has ever been. A new
Government Accountability Office report on the ATF released Wednesday found an agency trying to redefine itself while struggling with high personnel turnover and problems tracking its own criminal investigations, the Journal Sentinel reported.
The ATF became a separate entity in 1968. In that same year, an executive order called for better coordination among law enforcement agencies under the attorney general.
It's time to take that executive order to heart and eliminate a redundant agency that contributes little to making the nation safer.
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