Opponents of new gun laws incessantly go on about how the current rash of gun violence could be solved if we better enforced the existing laws. It's curious, then, that the top officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives seem to be going out of their way to ignore lawbreaking by gun dealers.
One store was cited for failing to conduct background checks before selling a gun. Another store owner told investigators he actively tried to circumvent gun laws. One threatened an A.T.F. officer, and another sold a gun to a customer who identified as a felon. All were previously cited by the A.T.F. In each instance, supervisors downgraded recommendations that the stores’ licenses be revoked and instead let them stay open.
Of about 11,000 inspections of licensed firearm dealers in the year starting in October 2016, more than half were cited for violations. Less than 1 percent of all inspections resulted in the loss of a license.
So as a gun dealer, you can brag about working around gun laws or can outright sell your wares to a felon and, regardless of what investigators find, the ATF's senior staff will let you keep doing it. And it's fairly clear that it's happening so that the ATF can avoid the bitter public fights that would occur between themselves and gun fanatics if they did crack down on gun shops that ignored current laws. We're not talking about flubbed paperwork, of the sort that is commonplace whenever paperwork is required, but willfully working to sell guns to people who shouldn't have them.
Surely, that should be enough to close down the offending shops. Nope. Our wonderful Congress, in its infinite wisdom (meaning after big campaign contributions from the NRA) has specified that you can only shut down dealers if you can prove they intended to violate the law, as opposed to just "accidentally" violating those laws over and over and over out of carelessness or stupidity. This is a difficult thing to prove in court, and so the ATF chooses to not piss anyone off by, as often as possible, not trying.
It may be that having the New York Times expose just how wishy-washy ATF leaders are about closing down violators may itself do something to encourage federal officials to reconsider the relative optics of giving in versus not, but in the end it once again comes down to Congress. The ATF is afraid of pissing Congress off by enforcing laws that Congress has made it intentionally difficult for them to enforce; even if the bureau sought to crack down on crooked dealers, the House and Senate can simply step in, yet again, by defunding their efforts to do it.
So it's incumbent on Congress to fix this mess. The current Republican crop won't do it; while the days of NRA ascendency on these issues are over, in the public mind, Republicans are still being their willing toadies after each and every mass shooting. After they're dumped, though, maybe a new team and a new attorney general can get together and show some backbone.