Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [65]
Law-enforcement agents within the ATFD welcomed their new responsibilities. They were accomplished lawmen with a lot of nitty-gritty, dangerous experience in battling the moonshiners of the South. But officially they were employees of the Internal Revenue Service, the nation’s tax collector. The images clashed. “When our law-enforcement officers were asked who they were, they would say Treasury agents,” said Rex D. Davis, a former director of ATF who at the time was an assistant regional commissioner of the ATFD. In outlying field offices, the agents placed signs on their doors that said Treasury Department. “Our guys didn’t want to be Internal Revenue agents.”
The Gun Control Act greatly expanded the division’s law-enforcement responsibilities. “There’s no question the Gun Control Act of 1968 was like a breath of fresh air,” Davis said. “It gave us a very important law-enforcement jurisdiction, and one that was nationwide as opposed to the moonshine and illicit-liquor enforcement, which was primarily regional, the Southern tier of states.”
When Davis became director in 1970, his “hidden agenda” included separating the ATFD from the IRS. Indeed, the division’s new responsibilities had begun causing something of an image problem for the IRS. When agents participated in raids or became involved in shoot-outs, the headlines inevitably described them as IRS agents, at a time when the IRS was actively promoting the value of voluntary compliance with federal tax laws. On July 1, 1972, the Treasury Department removed the division from the IRS and made it the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. (The bureau would later take to calling itself ATF, dropping the B.) Although most of the agents were delighted, a few were fearful, Davis said. “I think some people had a little trepidation. Really, what we were doing was putting ourselves out in front, and there were probably some people who felt it was nice and safe and cozy being a little thing in a great big place like Internal Revenue.”
Inevitably, the new bureau found itself on a collision course with the National Rifle Association.
By 1972, the NRA was already a formidable foe, but it was wrestling with its own internal schism. In 1968 the NRA’s executive vice president, Gen. Franklin Orth, committed what the association’s hard-liners considered an unpardonable sin. By then, the post of executive vice president had become the most powerful position within the NRA, far more so than the presidency. Orth had dared support, in public, federal gun controls. Not just any controls, moreover, but the Gun Control Act of 1968. The ATFD’s agents may have welcomed the new law, but the NRA’s hard-liners loathed it. And yet Orth, in testimony before a congressional committee debating the proposed legislation, had said no “sane American who calls himself an American” could object to the bill’s elimination of mail-order sales.
Orth was one of the NRA’s old guard, who saw the NRA in more traditional terms as an organization devoted to promoting hunting and hunter safety, protecting hunters’ rights, and protecting the environment. A growing segment of the NRA’s membership, however, wanted the NRA to become a political force and in so doing to become the nation’s primary guardian of the Second Amendment. To these hard-line fundamentalists, led by Harlon Carter, a former head of the U.S. Border Patrol, any gun law was an infringement of the Constitution and was to be opposed without compromise. Gradually, the hard-liners gained influence and, in 1977, at the NRA’s annual meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, won control of the board and elected Harlon Carter to be the new executive vice president.