ATF ‘Evaluating’ Bloomberg ‘Sting’To Sue Gun Shops
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is “evaluating” the six-week “sting” operation against 15 gun shops in five states that was mounted by anti-gun New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and a spokesman for the agency’s public affairs office told Gun Week they were never notified of the operation.
And it appears that New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly is trying to distance himself from Bloomberg’s “sting” by telling New York’s WNBC last month that the police department had not been consulted before the operation was launched.
The “sting” was designed to lay groundwork for New York’s lawsuit against the gun retailers.
Bloomberg’s headline-grabbing “sting” operation, mounted by private investigators, came under immediate criticism from gun rights activists and the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). The anti-gun New York Daily News also reported that the project may have interfered with more than a dozen on-going criminal investigations. An NSSF bulletin asserted that ATF had no prior knowledge of the sting, but was “willing to investigate whether laws were broken either by the gun dealers or the private investigators. NSSF is calling for ATF’s involvement.”
ATF spokesman Rich Marianos said he had no prior knowledge of the Bloomberg gun “sting.” He said the ATF Office of Public Affairs traditionally liaisons with law enforcement agencies on such operations. But Bloomberg’s operation involved private investigators, not police officers. Marianos stressed that Bloomberg’s “sting” was “conducted independent from ATF.”
And that may land Bloomberg, who hosted an anti-gun mayors’ summit earlier this Spring, in legal hot water, though the ATF is being characteristically closed-mouth about that. If “sting” investigators provided false information on federal firearms forms when they apparently bought guns from suspected rogue dealers, they could also face serious problems.
Marianos noted that he cannot discuss “ongoing investigations” and he also stipulated that “We can’t criminally prosecute. Federal attorneys do that.”
ATF, he said, will investigate the operation and turn over its findings to the US Attorney. He would not explain whether the agency was going to use information produced by the Bloomberg “sting,” or simply investigate the “sting” operation.
Lawrence G. Keane, vice president and general counsel for the NSSF contended that Bloomberg’s “stunt” might compromise ongoing investigations.
Quizzed about this, ATF’s Marianos could only tell Gun Week that he could not discuss ongoing investigations. The “sting” operation could prove to be Bloomberg’s undoing as a gun control crusader because of the possibility that he, or his investigators, violated state and federal gun laws in the process.
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