There are only 5k full-time ATF employees. This will do you very little good if they shoot you and your little dog, too.
Perhaps more critically, there is a much broader number of people who aren't full-time ATF employees but will quite happily shoot you and your little dog, too, on the ATF's say-so, and an even broader number who will complain heartily about the ATF misbehavior but give information to them because their jobs and livelihoods (and lives, see above) all depend on it.
The DEA might have lost the war when they didn't have enough people to handle fifty million potheads, but they didn't get to that point because of their headcount, but because state after state and organization after organization decided to stop playing along. Meanwhile, if you care about ATF leaving their body cameras at home before shooting Malinowski in the head, you're some wacko.
What's really awful is what happens when people realize this at scale. Like TraceWoodgrains' notice that Republicans have no white-collar institutional power transforming into an idea that those white-collar institutions will march triumphant, quite a lot of people assume that this means there is no option in defiance but to just keep trying these routines, harder.
Whether or not alternatives exist, there are dozens of far messier options to try.
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There are only 5k full-time ATF employees. This will do you very little good if they shoot you and your little dog, too.
Perhaps more critically, there is a much broader number of people who aren't full-time ATF employees but will quite happily shoot you and your little dog, too, on the ATF's say-so, and an even broader number who will complain heartily about the ATF misbehavior but give information to them because their jobs and livelihoods (and lives, see above) all depend on it.
The DEA might have lost the war when they didn't have enough people to handle fifty million potheads, but they didn't get to that point because of their headcount, but because state after state and organization after organization decided to stop playing along. Meanwhile, if you care about ATF leaving their body cameras at home before shooting Malinowski in the head, you're some wacko.
What's really awful is what happens when people realize this at scale. Like TraceWoodgrains' notice that Republicans have no white-collar institutional power transforming into an idea that those white-collar institutions will march triumphant, quite a lot of people assume that this means there is no option in defiance but to just keep trying these routines, harder.
Whether or not alternatives exist, there are dozens of far messier options to try.
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