Noting the BATFE's tendency to go after easy targets, like minor paperwork errors by established dealers and manufacturers, rather than hard ones like, oh, gun-running gangsters, the two Senators from Idaho have expressed their displeasure by blocking the confirmation of Michael Sullivan as the head of BATFE.
(And please note this when I say "minor paperwork errors": If you were a licensed dealer in Minneapolis, and every time you bought a gun from a local customer, you abbreviated the city as "Mpls." to fit in the postage stamp-sized blank in which you had to write their address, that's a "violation". Consider that the next time you hear about a nefarious illegal shop with "over two hundred violations".)
Here in Minneapolis, not only do you have to spell out "Minneapolis", but try fitting "Hennepin" into the less-than-postage-stamp size block for county in a Form 4473.
ReplyDeleteThe harassment of legitimate dealers by the ATF for those kind of paperwork "errors" is just plain wrong. But I guess it is a whole lot easier than going after actual bad guys.
The blocks on the 4473 are spacious compared to those in most logbooks.
ReplyDeleteThe most commonly used bound book in the industry has a space for the transferor's name and address that is about the size of the "County" block on the 4473.
Please write legibly!
It's classic bureaucratize to magnify the importance of minutae and paperwork over the actual job at hand simply because that's their interface with the rest of the natural world it assumes importance to them all out of proportion.
ReplyDeleteThey could make things easier on everybody by making the forms bigger and easier to fill-out but since they still have the same robotic job to do: collect, collate, tabulate, in triplicate - it's of no real benefit to them and denies them the cruelty they enjoy inflicting - which is one little perk in their useless lives.
Your papers do not appear to be in order. . .
ReplyDeleteGod bless Ryan Horsley!
ReplyDeletehttp://redstradingpost.blogspot.com/
It's nice to see Senator Craig taking a, ahem, stance on this issue.
ReplyDeleteI'm also reminded of a GAO audit of IRS where the IRS could not account for a third of its operating budget. Nice. What's the latin phrase for "who audits the auditors?"
One assumes, of course, that F Troop's Title 2 registry is completely in order and error-free. Otherwise the irony might be too overpowering.