Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [67]
To the NRA, this was tantamount to establishing a national registration system. Outright confiscation of guns would surely follow. “The NRA went ape,” Davis said. The association sent out an emergency plea to its members to write letters of protest. “We got over three hundred thousand pieces of correspondence, of which seven thousand were in favor. We had mailbags in the corridors.”
Nonetheless, ATF persisted and asked Congress for the $10 million the bureau felt it would need to develop the new computer system.
“We took a beating,” Davis said. “Congress not only didn’t give us ten million dollars. They took ten million dollars out of our budget. So they penalized us for having the gall to initiate these programs. Needless to say, the regulations were withdrawn by Treasury, by the Carter administration, with their tails between their legs.”
And ATF was left to cope with $10 million less in its operating budget.
Nonetheless, ATF still had the benefit of an administration that at least in spirit favored gun control. But Carter wouldn’t be president forever.
During the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan made it clear where his sympathies lay. He wooed the NRA with a campaign pledge that if elected president, he would abolish the hated bureau.
The NRA and its powerful allies, including Rep. John Dingell of Michigan and Rep. John Ashbrook of Ohio, both members of the NRA’s board of directors, moved in for the kill. The NRA went so far as to produce a TV documentary called It Can Happen Here, alleging ATF abuses. In the film, Representative Dingell appears and says, “If I were to select a jackbooted group of fascists who are perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today, I would pick ATF.”
What particularly irked the NRA was ATF’s tactic in the late 1970s of sending agents into gun stores masquerading as illegal buyers to see whether the dealers would sell them guns or suggest that they arrange a straw-man purchase. “We were using those kinds of techniques,” Rex Davis said, “because unscrupulous dealers were then, and are now, a major source for the illegal acquisition of guns.” Other agencies used similar sting techniques, but only ATF seemed to catch the heat. “If the guy was a pharmacist selling illegal narcotics,” Davis said, “nobody would scream at all.”
During a 1980 hearing, ATF defended itself by arguing that it had in fact conducted few operations against dealers. Its new director, G. R. Dickerson, testified, “We often hear that ATF makes a practice of harassing licensed dealers in an attempt to drive them out of business. I point out to the committee in the period July 1, 1979, through April 30, 1980 … we had over eight thousand seven hundred firearms investigations. Only one hundred and sixty-two involved licensed dealers.”
His testimony confirmed the fears of members of the gun-control camp, who charged that if anything ATF was too soft on dealers. At the same hearing the National Coalition to Ban Handguns presented a survey of 136 licensed gun dealers in New Haven, Connecticut, which found that “more than three-fourths (77.2 percent) of licensees were in direct violation of at least one federal, state, or local law or regulation. Nearly one-half (48.5 percent) were in violation of two or more firearms, tax, or zoning requirements.”
The NRA and its allies kept up the pressure. By September 1981 the NRA seemed assured of achieving the destruction of the bureau. That month, at a meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in New Orleans, President Reagan announced that he planned to fire ATF’s firearms enforcement agents and dissolve the bureau.