Monday, August 27, 2007

This Is An Interesting Claim...

Red's Trading Post, which has been having some problems with ATF about what sounds like trivial errors with a few of the Form 4473s, mentions something a bit worrisome:
As I have stated before ATF DIO Richard Van Loan has stated that he would have never revoked our license if we had purchased a computerized system. He neglected to contact us to find out that we had purchased 2 software systems that could not handle the amount of volume that we do. A third system we looked into was $9,000 just for the software. We then tried out other firearms software that we offered from one of our distributors, which we had issues with as well. We finally settled on a system from ARS Solutions. It is a $12,000 system that has just been make available for lease. Yet the ATF has now deemed this system before our judge, that is so widely used and touted...inadequate. Our Box Store Competitor has just developed a Million Dollar system.
If Red's is permanently closed by ATF, they will have to turn over the last 20 years of Form 4473s--or about 40,000 gun purchase records. Red's is concerned about the possibility that ATF is using the combination of requiring a computerized system and putting stores like Red's out of business to create a de facto gun registration system.

I understand their concern (although realistically, even all the 4473 forms in the U.S. wouldn't give even a 30% complete gun registration list), but I think there's another issue that should be looked into: is it possible that some sort of corrupt deal has been made by some ATF bureaucrat to require a particular software vendor's system? If you don't buy a system from a particular vendor, you get extra special scrutiny, and then get closed down for trivial errors on paper forms?

No comments:

Post a Comment