St. Louis CofCC Blog

KSDK:

ATF Chief: Crime Rose as Cities’ Funding Dropped

Violent crime has increased in some cities in recent years in part because local police are too cash-strapped to fight it, the ATF chief said Monday.

The comments by Michael J. Sullivan, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, echo pleas by mayors across the country for more federal dollars to combat crime.

Now the ATF cares about cities.  Usually, when they get involved with abusing firearms dealers and owners enforcing gun laws, it’s nowhere near protected racial minorities, even though they would make a far greater dent in serious violent crimes by focusing their enforcement in cities and their notorious citizens.  Later in this article, we find out that:

Whether the Senate will ever vote on Sullivan’s own confirmation. Sullivan, still the U.S. attorney in Boston, was nominated as ATF’s chief in March 2007. But Idaho’s Republican senators so far have blocked the nomination out of concern the ATF has become overly aggressive in enforcing gun laws.

Sullivan said the ATF last year did compliance checks on about 10,000 gun dealers and brokers, and suspended the licenses of 97 — fewer than 1 percent. He said the ATF is trying to balance regulating gun dealers equally across the country.

The ATF has been particulary abusive in Idaho.  For instance, it considers literally not dotting the lowercase “i” letters in people’s names, writing a two-digit (e.g. 07) as opposed to a four-digit (e.g. 2007) year on paperwork, and posting signs about required background checks inside gun stores that aren’t large enough or have a big enough typeface (font), as major transgressions worthy of trying to revoke the shop owner’s FLFD license.

So I think Sullivan is bloviating about cities and Federal money in order to grease the wheels among left-wing Senators to make his nomination official, so that he’ll be an “official” agency head and therefore be eligible for a Federal pension.