By the Back Door

Having spent the better part of his working career in law enforcement, ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ finds this story extremely troubling.

A team of inspectors from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives fled an Idaho gun shop where they were inspecting sales records when they learned their actions were being recorded on a blog...Now the federal agency has gone to court with a report that its inspectors "suspended" their work at the store recently because of the "threat to the inspectors' safety created by Ryan Horsley, the Manager of Red's."

Unless a law enforcement officer is employed in a covert capacity, why would his/her exposure to citizen observation constitute "intimidation" or "harassment"? This is especially true when the exposure includes operations by an upper level bureaucrat that cannot ever be conceived of as engaging in covert operations. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (which should, according to a tee shirt producing wag, be designated as a convenience store) has a sad history of thuggishness which would make the likes of Sarah Brady proud, appears to be engaged in accomplishing by bureaucratic abuse what the collectivists supporting citizen disarmament have failed to achieve legislatively.

On the other hand, any sentient observer is aware that most protections from oppression supposedly supplied to us by the Constitution are in fact a dead letter; for example the Second Amendment as it applies to the citizens of Washington DC, Chicago, New York or California as well as the First Amendment regarding speech as suppressed by the so called "Bipartisan Campaign Finance 'Reform' Law" coauthored by an individual who is so arrogant as to offer himself up as a candidate for the nation's highest office.

The Democrat majority in Congress appears to be more concerned with its war on the current administration by engaging in a public relations gottcha campaign and pursuing a collectivist economic agenda than concerning itself with rolling back the abuses of a cancerous government bureaucracy. Why are we not surprised?

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

cross posted at: Eternity Road
Hat tip: Jim Sullivan