Obama's Assault on Weapons: Project Gunrunner Backfires on the Left

Enter the Obama administration's gun control agenda, which breathed new life into Gunrunner and re-established the ATF leadership's standard ops tempo: SNAFU.

While Project Gunrunner failed in charting weapons distribution channels south of the border, Democrats saw its utility as a means to implement new gun regulations north of the border by asserting that all the violence in the region is the result of gun sales in the U.S.

The Obama administration hoped to make a case that Mexican organized crime syndicates depend on illegal U.S. sales of so-called "assault weapons." In doing so, they hoped to revitalize their political agenda to register and regulate the sale of those weapons -- a major Leftist goal for the last two decades.

With its mission transformed, in 2009 and 2010 the ATF expanded Project Gunrunner offices to McAllen, Texas, El Centro, California, Las Cruces, New Mexico, Sierra Vista, Arizona, and Brownsville, Texas, and added new Gunrunner teams in Tucson and in El Paso, Texas. Project Gunrunner's focus became exposing the illegal sale of guns in the U.S. in support of Obama's political objectives.

But the ATF's Gunrunner is now the subject of a political firefight.

On 28 December 2010, I was contacted by a career federal agent who, like many of his colleagues, honors his oath to "support and defend" our Constitution, whose support and defense is contingent on the Second Amendment's prohibition against government infringement on the right of citizens to keep and bear arms.

The contacting agent, who has a good track record of identifying government agendas designed to thwart 2A rights, told me that he suspected the weapon used in the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on 14 December was among those lost by the ATF during the Gunrunner operation a few months earlier. Senior career agents in Phoenix and Tucson confirmed that some of the weapons recovered at the scene of the murder of Agent Terry were, indeed, Project Gunrunner weapons, but because the ATF took control of the weapons, it could evade the establishment of any ballistic link between Project Gunrunner and the bullet that killed Terry.

Further, the agent I spoke with confirmed that the mission of Project Gunrunner was now purely political, an effort to "implement the registration of 'assault-type' rifles purchased anywhere in the United States." Obama's political appointees at ATF rejected numerous objections from field agents, including supervisory agents. Some objections were career terminators, including that of the ATF's attaché in Mexico City, Darren Gil, whose objections resulted in forced retirement on 31 December 2010, just two weeks after the murder of Brian Terry.