Poisoning the Well Against Lawful Gun Ownership

Federal agents are going "house to house" in Houston, Texas, investigating gun sales which they suspect will wind up in Mexico.

Success on the front lines of a government blitz on gunrunners supplying Mexican drug cartels with Houston weaponry hinges on logging heavy miles and knocking on countless doors. Dozens of agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — sent here from around the country — are needed to follow what ATF acting director Kenneth Melson described as a “massive number of investigative leads.”

All told, Mexican officials in 2008 asked federal agents to trace the origins of more than 7,500 firearms recovered at crime scenes in Mexico. Most of them were traced back to Texas, California and Arizona.

Among other things, the agents are combing neighborhoods and asking people about suspicious purchases as well as seeking explanations as to how their guns ended up used in murders, kidnappings and other crimes in Mexico.

“Ever turning up the heat on cartels, our law enforcement and military partners in the government of Mexico have been working more closely with the ATF by sharing information and intelligence,” Melson said Tuesday during a firearms-trafficking summit in New Mexico.

So far, so good. We should applaud their efforts to track down those responsible for illegal gun transfers out of the country.

But then the story takes another tack, predictably one that attempts to make a case for more government controls and restrictions on law abiding citizens:

The ATF recently dispatched 100 veteran agents to its Houston division, which reaches to the border.

The mission is especially challenging because, officials say, that while Houston is the number one point of origin for weapons traced back to the United States from Mexico, the government can’t compile databases on gun owners under federal law.

Agents instead review firearms dealers’ records in person.

You knew it was coming. The "boo hoo" of the government that they cannot require all information on all firearms from every American "under federal law."

A change in the law would imply that the government has a greater, or compelling interest in knowing who has the guns and ammo, than individual citizens' rights to own those weapons. That is simply wrong-headed thinking. Wrong on the Second Amendment and upon the very purpose of our Constitutional freedoms guaranteeing a limited government with great individual responsibility.

It is okay to treat lawbreakers as suspects. It is wrong to treat law abiding citizens as suspects, which is exactly the climate a national database would foster.

This is exactly the kind of story we have grown accustom to seeing in our metropolitan newspapers, written by reporters whose worldview is that the government is always best when it is biggest, and willing to help propagandize against individual rights at all times.