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There are problems in the enforcement of justice, but it's not nearly as bad as you're making it out to be. I presume you're referring to the Hunter Biden stuff? Well, that's largely symmetrical to Trump's Russia investigation: Lots of smoke, not much actual fire (at least by the president himself), yet partisans whip themselves into a frenzy over the issue since they're getting a maximally damning picture due to their filtered media consumption. Biden could very well face a frivolous impeachment trial like Trump did as well.
Last I heard, it's been confirmed that Hunter Biden got his bribes selling access to Joe to foreign entities, and some portion of the bribe money ended up in Joe's bank account. I'm pretty sure that's a felony.
Likewise, Hillary Clinton set up an illegal email server to evade lawful oversight, sent classified documents through it, and then attempted to cover up her crimes. I'm pretty sure there are at least a few felonies there.
Likewise, Bill Clinton appears to have been a rapist.
I'm not sure if George W Bush lying the country into a disastrous war is technically a felony, but it certainly ought to be. Ditto for Obama's administration intentionally supplying arms to Mexican drug cartels, which were then used to attack and murder American citizens, in an apparent attempt to generate support for gun control legislation.
I disagree that it's not as bad as I'm making it out to be. In fact, I think it is pretty much exactly that bad. I do not concede that the existing system retains any shred of legitimacy whatsoever. All that remains is the question of how to coordinate sufficient meanness to allow something more fit to be built on its ruins.
link for more info would be appreciated
Wiki
Writeup from the first page of search results.
I don’t see your angle here. Condemning the ATF for causing the deaths of mexican and parisian civilians and that border patrol guy, implies that letting people buy weapons is complicity in murder. You can either condemn the ATF, Obama, and the right to bear arms, or none of the above.
If you're a consistent 2A gunman, you have to, you know, bite the bullet. Obviously some of the legally sold guns are going to kill people. But guns don't kill people, and anyway protection against tyranny is worth it, and so on. So the ATF is perfectly innocent here.
Selling guns to murderous criminals is a bad idea, which is why we have made it illegal. The government directly facilitating the sale of large numbers of guns to murderous criminals, on purpose, is straightforwardly evil. The fact that they did so in secret, completely failed to achieve any of the purported law-enforcement objectives they offered as excuses after the fact, punished the whistleblower who revealed their activities, and rewarded and promoted the people who planned and executed their "failed" operation undermines any claim to legitimate purposes for their activities.
No. It is not only possible but is in fact trivial to distinguish between law-abiding citizens purchasing weapons for legitimate purposes, and arms traffickers buying weapons illegally and then transfer those weapons to murderous drug cartels. Such distinction is drawn in federal law, which was deliberately circumvented by the ATF. There is no justification for your conflation of legal and knowingly illegal arms sales.
This statement seems straightforwardly absurd, for reasons stated above.
No, I don't.
They were not legally sold. The gun dealers reported the purchases to the ATF, expecting them to arrest the purchasers. The ATF declined to do so, and in fact tried (successfully in some cases) to get them to sell more guns to the criminals, claiming it was part of a legitimate law enforcement operation. Given the results, I do not find that claim credible.
No, the ATF deliberately sold guns to the cartels, and claims to a legitimate law-enforcement reason for doing so are undermined by their complete failure to secure either the weapons or the criminals, and the subsequent rewarding of these failures by the agency higher-ups, the stonewalling of all subsequent attempts at investigation, and the punishment of whistleblowers. None of that looks like innocence to me.
What gun control law, that you support, makes this sale illegal?
You made the conspiratorial claim that this was some attempt to generate support for gun control legislation, but this is contradicted by their burying of the story, which is far more consistent with common incompetence. And as I said, pleading the ATF's complete innocence requires a pro-gun-rights perspective, which is obviously a position the obama administration would be reluctant to take.
...I think I misunderstood this the first time I read it. My instinctual response was "the laws that have already been passed regarding straw purchases by criminals or for illegal arms trafficking, which the government deliberately circumvented in this case." But perhaps I'm misunderstanding you? Are you asking what additional gun control restrictions need to be added to stop the Government from doing something its own laws say are illegal, simply because it's the agent that enforces those laws and can simply not enforce them when it wants to?
If that is your point, it seems like a bad one to me. What was done here was straightforwardly illegal. It happened anyway because the government directly and intentionally facilitated large-scale violation of the law, and then successfully covered it up to the point that they suffered no significant consequences. That is not a gun control problem, but rather a government control problem. No law aimed at preventing bad people from getting guns is going to work if the people tasked with enforcing it decide they would rather give the bad people guns instead.
I think they did it to push gun control because that seems to be the most straightforward motive available. Them burying the story does not contradict anything; they buried their direct facilitation of arm sales to the cartels, not arm sales to the cartels themselves, and they did it because once word got out they appear to have been more interested in insulating themselves from blowback than in deriving the hypothesized political advantage. And in fact, the political advantage was gained to a limited extent; arms trafficking from America to Mexico continues to be used as an argument for attacks on gun manufacturers and owners, as seen in the Mexican lawsuit against American firearms manufacturers that is proceeding in direct violation of black-letter federal law at this very moment.
I concede that they might be simply incompetent, and reflexively covered up evidence of their incompetence out of loyalty to the existing system. I note that there does not appear to be any available evidence that would distinguish such incompetence from active malice, and submit that if indeed incompetence is so severe as to be indistinguishable from malice, treating it as anything less than malice offers no general benefit to those suffering the consequences.
I do not see how pleading the ATF's complete innocence is even possible. The best you can argue is that every person involved except the whistleblower was so utterly incompetent and so determined to evade responsibility that the results of their actions are indistinguishable from criminal conspiracy. I do not see how a pro-gun-rights perspective enters the picture at all; the laws they deliberately violated are not a matter of significant contention in the gun control debate on either side, other than the general critique that the government routinely refuses to enforce them.
More generally, I do not think that Obama or the ATF finding it awkward to argue their innocence justifies them choosing instead to cover up either a complete clusterfuck failure resulting in numerous murders, or deliberate malice resulting in the same. I do not sympathize with them, and do not see why you would either.
Let’s say I support total marijuana legalization. Then I discover the DEA turned a blind eye to the sale of two tons of ganja, which was illegal. They said it was for a sting operation, but the drugs seemingly vanished in a puff of smoke. It would be hypocritical of me to accuse the DEA of knowingly ‘poisoning the youth’, destroying the economy and generally reefer madness roasting the shit out of the DEA for its inadequacy.
I would think extensive laws with the goal to prevent arms trafficking and straw purchases would... infringe. But you're telling me you support those laws unequivocally ? Want them strengthened?
All they did was not interfere in a transaction, I don't find it all that reprehensible, they should do that more often.
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