re: #12 Dark_Falcon

That isn’t just stupid, its a goddamned lie! Yes, “Fast and Furious” was poorly planned and executed, but there is absolutely no evidence to suggest the ATF actually sold any weapon to any person.

Good, now can you explain what about F&F was poorly planned and executed? Earlier you made the following claim about the program:

The basic fact of “Fast and Furious”, whatever else is true, is that the ATF fucked up badly and people got killed because of it.

Now a new set of facts about the program has come to light:

Customers can legally buy as many weapons as they want in Arizona as long as they’re 18 or older and pass a criminal background check. There are no waiting periods and no need for permits, and buyers are allowed to resell the guns. “In Arizona,” says Voth, “someone buying three guns is like someone buying a sandwich.”

By 2009 the Sinaloa drug cartel had made Phoenix its gun supermarket and recruited young Americans as its designated shoppers or straw purchasers. Voth and his agents began investigating a group of buyers, some not even old enough to buy beer, whose members were plunking down as much as $20,000 in cash to purchase up to 20 semiautomatics at a time, and then delivering the weapons to others.

The agents faced numerous obstacles in what they dubbed the Fast and Furious case. (They named it after the street-racing movie because the suspects drag raced cars together.) Their greatest difficulty by far, however, was convincing prosecutors that they had sufficient grounds to seize guns and arrest straw purchasers. By June 2010 the agents had sent the U.S. Attorney’s office a list of 31 suspects they wanted to arrest, with 46 pages outlining their illegal acts. But for the next seven months prosecutors did not indict a single suspect.

On Dec. 14, 2010, a tragic event rewrote the narrative of the investigation. In a remote stretch of Peck Canyon, Ariz., Mexican bandits attacked an elite U.S. Border Patrol unit and killed an agent named Brian Terry. The attackers fled, leaving behind two semiautomatic rifles. A trace of the guns’ serial numbers revealed that the weapons had been purchased 11 months earlier at a Phoenix-area gun store by a Fast and Furious suspect.

So, with the fog of uncertainty lifted, will you bother trying to explain and defend your earlier assertion that the ATF screwed up? It appears there was nothing ATF could do to stop the sales and that they tried to have the suspects arrested only to be blocked by prosecutors, exactly what did ATF do that got people killed?

The fact is that it’s the laws that need changing. The same law that the Congressional Republicans refuse to even discuss as being part of the problem are what hamstrung the ATF and prevented them from arresting the straw buyers and attempting to interdict the weapons.