BATFE Funding  by Tom Reynolds

The $1.7 billion Omnibus bill, that was just passed, included special funding for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. (BATFE formerly ATF.)  $2 billion has been allocated to help the BATFE move on various forms of gun control.

• Encourage VA medical centers to confiscate Firearms owned by veterans;

• Keep notes on the exact location of veteran’s firearms through their “gun storage maps” program.

The National Disposal Branch (NDB) is a branch of the BATFE and was created to destroy guns confiscated or used as crime evidence.  (Average, 23,000 each year.)

Part of the funding was to help the NDB follow the requirements with respect to its handling of the guns  scheduled to be destroyed.  Will money overcome bureaucratic complacency or is it rewarding incompetence? 

For example:

BATFE instructs firearms dealers (FFL’s) on how to avoid the theft of firearms.  But a former NDB Security Guard used the NDB’s stored firearms to create his own business. (Who said entrepreneurship was dead?)  He was stealing firearms from the facility where he worked and reselling them, after falsely certifying them as destroyed.  It wasn’t difficult because the NDB was not doing what it told FFL’s to do.  (Do as I say – not as I do?)

Liberals (gun grabbers by another name) have criticized drug laws as discouraging illegal drug users from seeking help.  Showing their usual lack of consistency, those same liberals don’t seem to care as much about veterans.  The Omnibus bill includes funding for the Veteran’s Administration to:

Ammoland reports that the primary use of the $2 billion will be $700 million to encourage states to pass Red Flag Laws.  (Remember when liberals believed in civil rights?  You know, those pesky amendments in the Bill of Rights that are now part of the United States Constitution.)

Ammoland also reports that some funding is for programs designed to discourage women from exercising their Second Amendment right.  (Can you imagine a government funded program to discourage people from exercising their 1st amendment right to free speech?  Hmm…actually I can.)

Running directly afoul of the goal of the Omnibus Bill, SCOPE is promoting an organization called Armed Women of America.  We’ve added their link to the front page of our web site and there is more about them on the Steuben County Chapter’s web page.