Yesterday I reported about the Obama Justice Departments' new gun control gun reporting regulations which target law abiding border state gun shop owners. Now, the National Rifle Association is vowing to fight back. From POLITICO:
The National Rifle Association is vowing to sue the Obama administration after it announced Monday that it will begin to require gun dealers in four border states to send reports to the government following multiple sales of some semi-automatic longarms.
"They don’t have the statutory authority to do it and we’ll file a lawsuit as soon as the first letters are sent" demanding the sales information from dealers, the NRA's legislative director Chris Cox told POLITICO Monday afternoon.
Obama administration officials denied that the decision to proceed with the new reporting requirement or the timing of its implementation had anything to do with the controversy over and Congressional investigation into an ATF's "Operation Fast & Furious," which allegedly lost track of more than 100 weapons suspected of being headed for Mexican drug cartels. Two of those weapons showed up at the scene of the killing of a Border Patrol agent in December.
Cox accused the Obama administration of making an end-run around Congress, which has approved mandatory reporting of multiple handgun purchases, but did not include long-arms or so-called assault weapons in that requirement.
"Because the American people don't approve of his gun-control agenda, he's trying to circumvent Congress, the NRA official said of Obama. "The whole thing is a disraction away from the gross incompetence that we’ve seen in this Fast & Furious scandal...The truth is a $40 billion criminal enterprise is not going to be worried about paperwork violations. This is not a serious attempt at controlling the drug cartels."
The entire reason why these shops were selling to straw man purchasers working for Mexican cartel members in the first place was because ATF was forcing them to do it despite shop owners, and lower level ATF agents, expressing discomfort with the program Operation Fast and Furious. Now, the Obama Justice Department is punishing law abiding gun shop owners for doing what they were told by federal officials rather than punishing out of control bureaucrats in Washington D.C.