by Michelle Malkin
For 30 years, Chicago banned handguns. The crime rate skyrocketed. Murders soared. Gangs blossomed. Desperate city officials even considered calling the National Guard to combat the out-of-control violence that all the "community organizing" in the world couldn't curb. The Supreme Court struck down Chicago's individual firearms ownership prohibition last year, but the same anti-gun zealots who put Windy City citizens' lives at risk remain in power.
And now one of them may soon be in charge of the scandal-plagued Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Meet Andrew Traver. He's President Obama's nominee to head ATF. The Senate Judiciary Committee refused to act on the original nomination last fall. His name was sent up again earlier this year, and a hearing has yet to be scheduled.
Traver misled the public in a fear-mongering appearance on a Chicago NBC affiliate TV news show. In the interview, he hyped "the growing frequency of gang members and drug dealers using heavy caliber military-type weapons" and described them as if they were machine guns: "Pull the trigger and you can mow people down." Traver and his agents "provided the reporter with a fully automatic AK-47, with which she was unable to hit the target," the NRA reported. "He then said that stray bullets are 'one of the main problems with having stuff like this available to the gangs.'"
Except for the fact, contradicting the implication of the NBC scare story and Traver's rhetoric, that fully automatic firearms are not available for sale through normal retail outlets. But the truth wouldn't have made for a story as sensationalized and swaggering as the one Traver helped concoct.
Instead of focusing on criminals, the bureaucracy-expanding ATF suits and their left-leaning, anti-gun benefactors target law-abiding gun dealers and shop owners. Far easier to shoot fish in a barrel than reptiles slithering in the dark.
Traver is known to be a "managerial bad apple in ATF circles."
NRA's Chris Cox summed up the nomination bluntly: "You might as well put an arsonist in charge of the fire department."
Americans need someone who'll strip the whitewash, not second-coat it.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=42655
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