Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [66]
The NRA chose to attack ATF as a means of diminishing the impact of the newly passed legislation. “That was a well-known strategy in Washington,” Davis said. “If you’re opposed to a law, the way to attack it is to attack the agency which has responsibility for it, and thereby reduce the enforcement of law.”
When Davis became director, he set out at first to try to smooth relations between his agency and the NRA. “I thought it made sense,” he said. “I guess probably what I started out doing was giving them too much credit. I thought that two sides to an issue through dialogue and good-faith efforts could make it a little easier on each other. But I found that not to be true.”
He told the NRA’s new executive vice president, Gen. Maxwell Rich, he would investigate any NRA complaints about his agency and give him a full report. “That didn’t work. Their primary interest as I saw it and as I found out was in criticizing and attacking the credibility of the bureau, rather than trying to reach some accommodation.”
Indeed, to Harlon Carter’s NRA the new bureau was the vilest of enemies. The bureau did little to smooth relations. In March of 1978, for example, ATF agents seized four machine guns and three other weapons from the NRA’s elaborate firearms museum on the first floor of its Washington headquarters, charging the weapons had not been registered in accordance with the National Firearms Act. “We didn’t feel that anybody was above the law,” Davis said. “We saw a clear violation.” The NRA countered that the guns no longer worked and were thus exempt from provisions of the act. A federal judge agreed and ordered the bureau to return the guns. There was more to this raid on NRA headquarters than dispassionate enforcement of federal law. Davis said, with a smile, “I suspect that we would have been a little bit gleeful if we had found something a little bit more severe.”
The NRA kept the pressure on Davis and the bureau. The association routinely attacked the bureau before Congress, depicting its agents as secret police who systematically trampled the rights of ordinary citizens. It cited example after example of what it alleged to be ATF abuses, including the case of Kenyon Ballew, a pressman with The Washington Post, who was shot in the head and paralyzed during an ATF raid on his apartment. The NRA and Gun Owners of America charged that the bureau’s men barged in without reasonable cause and shot an innocent gun owner.
In fact, Ballew possessed many firearms and chose to point one at the raiding party as they entered, prompting a Montgomery County police officer to fire. The bullet struck Ballew in the head. ATF agents seized three hand-grenade casings and a supply of black powder, which together constituted an illegal destructive device. Ballew sued, but lost. The federal court found that the ATF agents “had acted reasonably” and agreed the “three grenades together with the powder seized were in combination both designed and intended to be used as destructive devices.”
The NRA, however, took Ballew, by now in a wheelchair, to its annual meetings and wheeled him onstage as evidence of ATF’s infamous behavior.
Despite these attacks, the bureau felt reasonably safe. When Rex Davis became director, Richard Nixon was still president, and he favored some gun controls. So did Gerald Ford. And so too did Jimmy Carter. At one point, apparently with the blessings of the Carter White House, the Treasury Department invited Rex Davis to design new regulations that would help improve enforcement of the Gun Control Act—whatever regulatory powers Davis felt he would most like to have and that could be instituted without new legislation.
Davis, delighted