Opinion

John Stoehr: Want gun control? Empower the ATF

John Stoehr Business columnist John Stoehr Business columnist Photo: Ned Gerard / Hearst Connecticut Media Photo: Ned Gerard / Hearst Connecticut Media Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close John Stoehr: Want gun control? Empower the ATF 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

In 1981, the National Rifle Association produced a short film called “It Can Happen Here.” In it, federal agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) are depicted as “Nazi gestapos” and “jack-booted fascists.”

The following year, U.S. Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, said this of the agency tasked with regulating the gun market: “I would love to put [ATF agents] in jail,” said Dingell, now retired. “I think they are evil.”

By the 1990s, the NRA’s coordinated attacks on the ATF reached a fever pitch. It was called a “loose cannon” harassing gun owners. It was accused of “murder and persecution of innocent citizens.” The late U.S. Rep. Harold Volkmer, D-Mo., called it “the most Rambo-rogue law enforcement agencies in the United States.” A conservative talk-radio host went to far as to advise listeners to take “head shots,” because ATF agents were known to wear bullet-proof vests. In 1995, 100 ATF agents reported death threats not only to themselves but to their children.

The 1990s saw a fever pitch of incendiary rhetoric, but the 2000s saw the NRA’s agenda turned into policy. The George W. Bush administration allowed to expire, in 2004, a federal ban on assault weapons. Four years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Heller v. District of Columbia, which “nationalized” the Second Amendment so states could not prohibit ownership of handguns for self-defense.

There’s a name for all of the above.

It’s calling expanding the “scope of conflict.”

That’s what EE Schattschneider called it in his classic book from 1960, “The Semi-Sovereign People.” A Wesleyan political scientist, Schattschneider was trying to understand how people organize themselves to achieve power and use it to enact policies they want.

He said it is the loser of policy fights “who calls for outside help” in order to gain the advantage, which is then used to change the outcome. In the 1960s, the NRA was the loser. Since then, the NRA has expanded the scope of conflict to include unrelenting attacks on the ATF.

Now, the NRA is the winner. Gun control is the loser. But since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, and since this year’s Parkland massacre, and now the mass shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, the losers have been expanding the scope of conflict to include unrelenting and entirely founded attacks on the NRA. If Schattschneider is right in that conflict comes before policy, that is a necessary step.

But policy must come into play. Right now, policy discussions are about background checks and weapons bans. So far, nothing from the gun control side about enforcement. As long as the ATF is weak, laws won’t achieve what gun control advocates desire. Consider these facts from Robert Spitzer’s “The Politics of Gun Control.”

In 1985, the ATF had 400 agents to inspect more than 200,000 gun sellers. In 1994, it was 250 agents for more than 280,000 sellers. From 1972 to 2005, the ATF revoked an average of 20 licenses per year. Through the 2000s, “corrupt gun dealers” who violated criminal laws “were almost never prosecuted.”

Think about that for a moment.

A former ATF director said he was so understaffed and underfunded, it would take his agency 750 years to properly vet firearms dealer applications. He also said that illegal trafficking was so widespread at private-sale gun shows that “if we wanted to, we could go to a gun show and arrest people coming out, and just line ’em up.”

It gets worse. By law, the ATF is barred from computerizing its records. To this day, the vetting of firearms licenses are done by hand on paper. The agency is also barred, Spitzer writes, from creating a database of what guns are sold to whom, where and when. We still don’t not know how many guns are stolen each year.

The tide is turning against the NRA. We can all feel it. And that tide is gaining momentum with each new revelation about the NRA’s role in forming a back channel between the president of the United States and tyrannical foreign powers. But eventually, as the scope of conflict is sufficiently expanded, we’ll need to talk about policy.

That means empowering the ATF.

John Stoehr is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and a New Haven resident.