BATFE

The Washington Post is reporting that the BATFE is requesting an “emergency regulation” that would require Federal Firearms Licensees along the Mexican border to report any sale of two or more semi-automatic rifles in a caliber greater than .22 that may accept a detachable magazine within any five consecutive day period. The actual language from the Federal Register reads:

The purpose of the information is to require Federal Firearms Licensees to report multiple sales or other dispositions whenever the licensee sells or otherwise disposes of two or more rifles within any five consecutive business days with the following  characteristics: (a) Semi automatic; (b) a caliber greater than .22; and (c) the ability to accept a detachable magazine.

The Post headlines the article “Proposal calls for gun dealers to report bulk sales of assault weapons” which makes it seem like BATFE is talking about crate sized sales of AK’s and AR’s sold in Arizona. Despite what the Post would have you believe, it doesn’t matter if you live in Tucson, Arizona or Talkeetna, Alaska the requirement is the same.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation calls the Post on this and has some suggestions for commenting on this proposed “emergency regulation”:

ATF to Require Multiple Sales Reports for Long Guns
December 17, 2010 By Larry Keane

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is moving to require federally licensed firearms retailers to report multiple sales of modern sporting rifles beginning January 5, 2011. Specifically, the ATF requirement calls for firearms retailers to report multiple sales, or other dispositions, of two or more .22 caliber or larger semi-automatic rifles that are capable of accepting a detachable magazine and are purchased by the same individual within five consecutive business days.

Today’s Washington Post suggests that the reporting mandate would be limited to retailers along the Southwest border; however, the Federal Register Notice does not limit the geographic scope of the reporting requirement.

This ATF “emergency” mandate was originally pushed by the anti-gun Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) coalition, headed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, more than a year and a half ago. And the Post reports that the Department of Justice has “languished” over this plan for several months. Given this timetable, it’s hard to see exactly where the “emergency” is.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation opposes this reporting requirement because it further burdens America’s law-abiding firearms retailers with yet another onerous regulation that will do nothing to curb crime. Multiple sales reporting of long guns will actually make it more difficult for licensed retailers to help law enforcement as traffickers modify their illegal schemes to circumvent the reporting requirement, thereby driving traffickers further underground. This is not unlike how criminals maneuvered around one-gun-a-month laws in states like Virginia – which is still considered an “exporting source state” by anti-gun organizations like the MAIG despite its restrictions on the number of firearms law-abiding residents may purchase.

Multiple sales reporting for long guns is an ill-considered mandate and one that ATF does not have the legal authority to unilaterally impose. In fact, ATF has not specified under what legal authority it presumes to act. The decision as to whether ATF can move forward with this agenda-driven mandate will be left to Cass Sunstein who heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). This is the same Cass Sunstein who in a 2007 speech at Harvard University said, “We ought to ban hunting, if there isn’t a purpose other than sport and fun. That should be against the law. It’s time now.”

NSSF will be submitting comments in opposition to this registration scheme and is encouraging all firearms retailers, sportsmen and enthusiasts to do the same.

Please voice your concern by doing the following:

1. Call the Office of Management and Budget, Office of Information and Regulation Affairs, Department of Justice, Desk Officer at (202) 395-6466.

2. E-mail Barbara A. Terrell, ATF, Firearms Industry Programs Branch at Barbara.Terrell@atf.gov

3. Call your Senators and Representative: United States Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121

Points to make:

1.Multiple sales reporting of long guns will actually make it more difficult for licensed retailers to help law enforcement as traffickers modify their illegal schemes to circumvent the reporting requirement. Traffickers will go further underground, hiring more people to buy their firearms. This will make it much harder for retailers to identify and report suspicious behavior to law enforcement.

2.Long guns are rarely used in crime (Bureau of Justice Statistics).

3.Imposing multiple sales-reporting requirements for long guns would further add to the already extensive paperwork and record-keeping requirements burdening America’s retailers – where a single mistake could cost them their license and even land them in jail.

4.Last year, ATF inspected 2,000 retailers in border states and only two licenses were revoked (0.1%). These revocations were for reasons unknown and could have had nothing to do with illicit trafficking of guns; furthermore, no dealers were charged with any criminal wrongdoing.

5.According to ATF, the average age of a firearm recovered in the United States is 11 years old. In Mexico it’s more than 14 years old. This demonstrates that criminals are not using new guns bought from retailers in the states.

6.Congress, when it enacted multiple sales reporting for handguns, could have required multiple sales of long guns – it specifically chose not to.

This “emergency regulation” goes along with the Department of Justice Inspector General report on Operation Gunrunner released back in November. At the time, Deputy Director Kenneth Melson said he concurred in the recommendation to require reporting of multiple long arm sales but thought it required a change in the law. Now that Andrew Traver has been nominated as Director and I presume is now the Acting Director of ATF, I guess how the law reads is of no great importance as long as the words “emergency” and “Mexico” are used in conjunction.

See also Sebastian’s post regarding the statutory authority for BATFE to do this. There is none.

UPDATE: Thanks to Kurt Hofmann, .45Superman, who pointed out that the caliber restriction is for calibers greater that .22 which presumably means an AR-15 in .223 would be covered. I had originally read it as .22 or above. I guess they were afraid of irritating people who were merely buying Ruger 10/22’s for their twin sons.

UPDATE II:  David Codrea put up a special Gun Rights Examiner column on this issue. It is well worth reading. With regard to the ATF’s notice in the Federal Register, he says:

That’s funny. I don’t see anything in there about “Assess where in the Constitution such authority in data-gathering is determined consistent with the intent of the Founders that ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’” I guess that kind of archaic thinking generally results in a scornful “Are you serious?” rejection these days…

If one was to depend on the mainstream media or big media to know that Andrew Traver had been nominated by President Obama to be the Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, you’d be out of luck.

Only two of the 25 largest newspapers in the country have any mention of the Traver nomination. The New York Times had a report on Nov. 15th and originally spelled Traver as “Taver”. They didn’t give much info other than that Traver is the SAC for the Chicago Field Division and that his confirmation would probably be opposed.

Al Kamen had a brief mention of Traver in his In The Loop column yesterday. Kamen’s column was where Traver’s nomination was first floated as a trial balloon back in August. He had this to say about it:

As we mentioned back on Aug. 4, if approved, Traver would be the first-ever Senate-confirmed ATF director. The position had been filled (at the Treasury Department and more recently at Justice) without Senate input. Since the job became Senate-confirmable in 2006, it seems, no one has made it past the watchful eyes of the gun lobby.

Hard to imagine Traver will be approved by the new Senate.

The only mention of Traver’s nomination in the Chicago area was on the WLS-TV, the ABC affiliate. Even then all they did was reprint the relevant parts of the press release from the White House announcing the nomination. No other newspaper or TV/radio station has any mention of Traver on their websites and that includes both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times.

So what about the major broadcast and cable networks? Nothing. No ABC, NBC, or CBS. No CNN, Fox, or MSNBC.

One must wonder why Andrew Traver is being treated as such a stealth candidate in the media. Is it because his appointment only matters to the gun culture and the anti-gun rights forces and for the rest of the world it is considered ho-hum news? Or is it because the intent is to sneak Traver through the confirmation process?

Sebastian at Snow Flakes in Hell is of the opinion that Obama is just waiting until Congress goes into recess to make this a recess appointment which wouldn’t require the advice and consent of the Senate. Traver would hold the office until the end of the next  Congress or until the 112th Congress ends in 2012. We’ll just have to wait a few more days and see.

UPDATE: David Codrea agrees with Sebastian on the possibility of a recess appointment for Traver. He goes over the details in his National Gun Rights Examiner column.

UPDATE II: Welcome Instapundit readers and thanks to Glenn for the Instalanche!

Here are links to my earlier posts on Andrew Traver.

NRA on Traver

Brady Center on Traver

Jesse Jackson, Jr. on Traver

Who is Andrew Traver

I Don’t Believe in Coincidences

First Post on Traver

Feel free to post any or all of these blog entries on your favorite forum. Since the Big Media isn’t going to publicize the nomination, it will take an Army of Davids to do it instead. All I ask is that you include a link back to the original.

Note: Much of this was written two months ago. Yesterday, Obama nominated Traver to be the Director of ATF.

With the pressure from the Brady Campaign along with editorials in the New York Times, the Obama Administration is being pushed to name a permanent Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. ATF has not had a permanent Director since Carl Truscott who resigned in 2006. The leading candidate seems to be Andrew Traver who is currently the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the ATF’s Chicago Field Division.(Traver was nominated yesterday)

Traver at a 2008 news conference with then-Rep. Mark Kirk

I’ve printed speculation about Traver being the leading candidate here and here. According to my tracking software for this blog, I have had numerous visitors from the Department of Justice doing a Google search using “Andrew Traver ATF”. I even had a visitor about two weeks ago (now two months ago) from the Executive Office of the President searching for what was being said about ATF and a new Director. A screen shot of that visit can be seen here. Traver has also been mentioned frequently on the dissident ATF insider’s website CleanUpATF as being the defacto candidate for Director. (And now is the actual candidate.)

So who is Andrew Traver and why should we care?

As noted above, Traver is the SAC of the ATF’s Chicago Field Division. He is an Illinois native and a graduate of Northern Illinois University with a degree in Criminal Justice (summa cum laude). After college, he was commissioned as a Naval officer through Officer Candidate School and served as a gunnery officer on USS Benjamin Stoddard, DDG-22. Upon leaving the Navy in 1987, he joined ATF as a Special Agent.

His ATF career to date is as follows:

• 1987 – Chicago Field Division, Criminal Investigator and a member of the Entry Control Team.
• 1993 – Philadelphia Field Division, Group Supervisor
• 1998 – Assigned to ATF Headquarters, Washington, DC
• 2000 – Assistant Special Agent in Charge, New Orleans Field Division
• 2002 – Assistant Special Agent in Charge, San Francisco Field Division
• 2004 – Special Agent in Charge, Chicago Field Division
• 2006 – Promoted to Senior Executive Service, still SAC, Chicago Field Division

Personal Life

Traver is married and has three sons in their early to mid teens. He and his family currently live in the Chicago suburb of Naperville.

Traver is a prostate cancer survivor and it seems to have had a profound impact on him as one would well imagine. In 2008, at the age of 44, he was diagnosed with stage T2 prostate cancer. He ended up having a radical retropubic prostatectomy (RRP) at the Mayo Clinic. Post-surgery and recovery, Traver became active in ZERO- The Project to End Prostate Cancer. He has done presentations for them and has urged all the male agents in his Field Division to be tested.

In addition to his work with ZERO, Traver is the Veterans Outreach Coordinator in the Chicago area for The Mission Continues. This is an organization that works with and supports wounded vets from Iraq and Afghanistan.

From a story about his work with ZERO:

Andrew’s personal and professional relationships with Congressmen Mark Kirk and Jesse Jackson Jr., and Ken Bennett, state director to then-Senator Barack Obama, figured heavily into his recovery. All three men closely followed Andrew’s ordeal from initial diagnosis through the first post-RRP follow up visit to Mayo. He received telephone calls from Congressmen Jackson and Kirk themselves while at Mayo and while recuperating at home. Just prior to and again shortly after his surgery, Andrew and Mr. Bennett met for morale and spiritually uplifting lunches.

 Connections to Joyce Foundation

Traver has significant connections to projects of the notoriously anti-gun Joyce Foundation. The Joyce Foundation provided $675,000 in funding for the International Association of Chiefs of Police – IACP – to put on the 2007 Great Lakes Summit on Gun Violence. Traver was a participant in this meeting along with such gun control notables as Gary Wintemute, Director of UC-Davis’ Violence Prevention Research Program, Nina Vinik and Robyn Thomas of the Legal Community Against Violence, and David Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health. There were also a number of representatives from some of the local gun control organizations and a selection of anti-gun politicians and police chiefs including Mayor Richard Daley.

It is important to note that Traver was not a mere attendee at this meeting, he is listed as an advisor to it along with others like Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center and Nina Vinik of LCAV. The acknowledgments thanks the advisers who “worked tirelessly to help us design and accomplish a powerful policy summit by attending many meetings and events and by voicing their invaluable counsel as we moved forward with this important initiative.”

Out of this conference came a report entitled Taking a Stand: Reducing Gun Violence in Our Communities. Contributors to the report included Tom Diaz mentioned above and Kristen Rand of the Violence Policy Center. The report made a number of recommendations which, to put it mildly, are anathema to those who believe in gun rights. Included in the recommendations were:

• Requiring that all gun sales take place through Federal Firearms License (FFL) holders with mandatory background checks
• Enacting an effective ban on military-style assault weapons, armor-piercing handgun ammunition, .50 caliber sniper rifles and other weapons that enable criminals to outgun law enforcement
• Repealing the Tiahrt Amendment, which hinders investigation of illegal gun trafficking
• Destroying guns that come into police possession once their law enforcement use has ended
• Mandating safe storage of firearms by private citizens and providing safe facilities where gun owners can store their weapons
• Mandating reporting of lost and stolen firearms
• Develop a best practices protocol for voluntary gun surrender programs
• Congress should restore funding for the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant Program for state, local and tribal agencies to investigate and prosecute cases of gun trafficking and gun violence
• The federal government should increase funding to ATF for personnel and technical assistance to combat gun violence
• Congress should enact legislation to allow federal health and safety oversight of the firearms industry

 Opinion of Traver within ATF

CleanUpATF.org is a forum for dissident ATF agents and staff to vent their frustrations with the organization and with management. Reading the comments there on a regular basis gives you an idea of what the agents in the field think. Their comments on Traver are both revealing and discouraging.

Word is the Vetting process found some pretty scary skeletons in Mr. Travers closet. We are in trouble if this is true. Hopefully Mr. Obama has an alternate plan or we are done. Another 6 months w/o a Director and we will all be carrying Homeland security badges.Word is Mr. Traver has some issues with the truth. More to follow. Guess Steve Martin will be retiring after all. (Oct. 11)

Somebody explain The Andy Traver selection please.Everyone that has worked with him has the same opinion. A nice guy, as vanilla as they come and a marginal performer at every level of his career. The only plus being championed is “at least he’s a gun toter”. In other words, our first AGENT Director. Seriously? We have 2500 agents many of whom are quiet legends, to include reitred prior “gun toters”. With all due respect he had ONLY 2 ASACs under his command, and one was driving a Government owned Cadillac and he DIDN’T notice? She abused her authority and misappropriated funds and is still an ASAC? (Sept 30)

Hearings into ATFs regulatory functions cancelled with allegations looming that Chief Counsels office knowingly and willfully have tried to circumvent Federal law and artificially impact statutory import procedures. If Mr. Melson cannot reign in the Executive leadership with his vast education and experience, what makes anybody think Andy Traver is more capable? (Sept 15)

Somebody please advise when and where Traver had ever been battle tested or command tested? Why is Jim Cavanaugh chiming in on ever commentary? SAC Traver is a decent man but was at best a marginal agent with limited street time, a borderline non-committal supervisor and a non-descript manager. He is middle of the road and doesn’t have an opinion ATF has not told him he was allowed to have. Director? Seriously Mr Obama and Holder? (Aug. 4)

View PostDoc Holiday, on 08 July 2010 – 01:13 PM, said:
Very marginal agent, uninspiring manager. Nuff said. Great guy to have as a neighbor, but has never had an original idea and doesn’t have an opinion that he hasn’t cleared with superiors.
Is this going to be an infusion of Chicago style politics into ATF management? (July 8)

Heard the same thing. Grapevine has it that he was really kissing up to Obama or his folks before and after the election and then strutting around about how he was going to be the next Director.
I have to wonder if he knows Blago. (July 8)

You can add Andy Traver, in Chicago to that list of young, incompetent SAC’s at the age of 40ish. Here is a recent example of his “leadership”! Chicago just held a Fantasy Agent Draft! They took approximately 75% of the Agents, only the ones located in the Chicago land area (because we can’t afford to move anyone) and moved them from group to group based on their popularity with a Supervisor! They even had a pre-draft meeting where the Supervisors were told the rules and order of which they were to make their selections! The Supervisors were able to “protect” 1-2 of their favorite agents (read between the lines: good-old boy-club). The dry erase board went into overdrive as the Supervisors threw agents under the bus and argued with other Supervisors in-order to trade agents! It was the most unprofessional processes you can imagine. Traver threaten discipline on any Supervisor who leaked what actually went on inside the trades! Yet, Traver, his front office team and supervisors thought it was a great idea. At the same time, Traver had his Supervisors meeting where he basically tore up HQ’s and showed his continued disdain and lack of respect for all his bosses. Yet, he wonders why not one of his management team respects him. For that matter, none of Andy’s counterparts (SAC’s) respects him. He leads by example…No interest in ATF nor any respect for bosses! If only the agents could get a dry erase board and select their Supervisors, ASAC’s and SAC. I bet the only survivor would be the Supervisor who just returned from exile, Fargo North Dakota. If only someone in HQ’s gave a damn about the sinking ship in Chicago, they would clear out the front office and all participating Supervisor in this fantasy draft!! (Oct 21, 2009)

 Conclusion

Traver has been the rumored candidate for the Director of ATF from the moment that Obama was elected and now is the nominee in fact. He has been in bed with the anti-gun forces including the Joyce Foundation since the moment he became the Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago Field Division. As seen by the comments above, he is not widely respected by the ATF field who consider him a nice enough guy but marginal when he was in the field and even more marginal as a manager.

Traver makes a nice personal interest story and I’m glad his cancer is in remission. That said, I don’t want someone like him in charge of ATF and I sincerely doubt he would clean out the culture of corruption that seems to exist in ATF’s management. It is time for the Senate to just say no.

UPDATE: Other blog’s take on Traver

The Truth About Guns plus this earlier post

Sipsey Street Irregulars (who first broke the story back in July)

SnowFlakesInHell

Armed and Safe

St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner


National Gun Rights Examiner

Void Where Prohibited

Dad29

Extrano’s Alley 

Eyes Never Closed plus this

Of Arms and the Law

Sharp As A Marble 

View From North Central Idaho

The Breda Fallacy