ATF accused of perverting laws in a scheme to shut down gun shops and punish legal dealers.
The agency claimed in a court filing on Tuesday its enforcement agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, is “the nation’s largest civil rights law enforcement agency.”
It’s an ironic position to take for the bureau, which was founded in 1978 and is designed to stamp out drug dealers, not gun shops.
“The ATF is an agency that focuses on the wrong problem at the wrong time,” said David Chipman, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
The ATF used an obscure state law to impose its crackdown.
It’s the same law that a court in Missouri last week tossed out an earlier cease-and-desist order against an ATF agent.
The state argued that the ATF, which was using the state of Iowa’s gun-buying requirement on gun dealers to target dealers in Missouri, had violated the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment by preventing people from exercising their right to keep and bear arms.
The ATF responded by throwing in a new law under which the ATF has sole power to define the federal law it will enforce, said Chipman.
The agency argued that since President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 prohibited state and local officials from doing gun-buying or gun-running, it’s a federal matter and can’t be used by other federal agencies.
But the court disagreed.
“Here we confront the question whether the government may use state or local laws to abridge rights protected by the federal Constitution,” wrote U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Durkin in his Feb. 24 order. “We conclude that it is not, because the Supreme Court’s decisions have made clear that the Due Process Clause imposes limits on the government’s ability to regulate a person’s freedom.”
The ATF didn’t respond to questions about why it believes state laws are more constitutional than federal ones, or why it believes a state law to be more constitutional than federal laws.
It did release a statement, saying: “The federal government is under no obligation to recognize or follow the laws of any state.
“The ATF will enforce federal laws as written and enforced under the laws of the United States,” it said.
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