Fast and Furious: Feds Forced Gun Store Owner to Make Illegal Sales

In the fall of 2009, ATF agents installed a secret phone line and hidden cameras in a ceiling panel and wall at Andre Howard’s Lone Wolf gun store. They gave him one basic instruction: Sell guns to every illegal purchaser who walks through the door.

For 15 months, Howard did as he was told. To customers with phony IDs or wads of cash he normally would have turned away, he sold pistols, rifles and semiautomatics. He was assured by the ATF that they would follow the guns, and that the surveillance would lead the agents to the violent Mexican drug cartels on the Southwest border.

When Howard heard nothing about any arrests, he questioned the agents. Keep selling, they told him. So hundreds of thousands of dollars more in weapons, including .50-caliber sniper rifles, walked out of the front door of his store in a Glendale, Ariz., strip mall.

He was making a lot of money. But he also feared somebody was going to get hurt.

“Every passing week, I worried about something like that,” he said. “I felt horrible and sick.”

>This admin considers themselves to be above the law.

I would say that most government agencies consider themselves above the law.
Let me provide an example; in New Mexico the State Constitution says:
Art II, Sec. 6. [Right to bear arms.]
No law shall abridge the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms for security and defense, for lawful hunting and recreational use and for other lawful purposes, but nothing herein shall be held to permit the carrying of concealed weapons. No municipality or county shall regulate, in any way, an incident of the right to keep and bear arms.

Yet, in spite of this, ALL municipal and county courthouses I have seen (admittedly not exhaustive) prohibit weapons therein, despite BOTH sentences above both of which prohibit them from doing so.
Further, there is NMSA 30-7-2.4. (Unlawful carrying of a firearm on university premises; notice; penalty.) which violates the first clause of the cited portion of the State’s Constitution, passed by the State’s legislature (contrary to the Constitution of the State) and enforced by the police (also contrary).

So, there you have an instance of all three branches of a government ignoring the exact same portion of their governing Constitution in preference to their own whims: therefore, they see themselves as above the law.
QED

I could have, but I use it rarely and judiciously - and since this not only was an issue that murdered a bunch of US citizens at the same time trying to create false data to justify stripping away 2A rights from everyone, I used it. I asterisked out enough.

The apologists at the LA Times claim, "As the case of the two Lone Wolf AK-47s tragically illustrates, the ATF, with a limited force of agents, did not keep track of them."

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/11/nation/la-na-atf-guns-20110912

Finally, an explanation for the LA Times committment to the story.

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