He's Baaaaack!

Among a whole list of re-nominations sent by the White House to the Senate is that of Andrew Traver to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. I guess Obama really does think he can poke us in the eye again with this anti-gun nominee.

The website Main Justice notes that Traver's nomination is opposed by the NRA and other gun rights groups as well as that the agency has not had a permanent director since 2006.

No word yet from the Brady Campaign on this nomination. However, Dennis Hennigan praised it last December as the beginning of the end of Obama's "appeasement" of gun rights forces.

While I really don't think Traver can get approved by the Senate given his record of anti-gun activism, I think his renomination actually can serve a useful purpose for gun rights. The confirmation hearings will be an opportunity to air much of ATF's dirty laundry which has been ignored by the mainstream media. These range from gross mismanagement in the upper levels of the bureau to allegations of looking the other way to AR's being smuggled into Mexico so that they could be traced back to the U.S.

David Codrea's Gun Rights Examiner has a number of columns dealing with these issues as does Mike Vanderboegh's Sipsey Street Irregulars blog. Sources within ATF are now sending substantive leaks to both of these sites because they are so disgusted with what is going on.

The dissident ATF agent website, CleanUpATF.org, is also full of details about how the bureau is being mismanaged. If one wants to get a feel for how the rank and file in the ATF are suffering under the mismanagement, this is the place to go.

Given all the dirt that can and will come out at Traver's confirmation hearings, one must wonder if this is some sort of end game to abolish ATF which has served as lightning rod for the gun rights movement and then reconstitute its gun control functions in a less public part of the Federal bureaucracy. That would be truly Machiavellian if true!


H/T Sebastian