![]() Ten weeks later, an ATF agent named John Dodson, whom Voth had supervised, made startling allegations on the CBS Evening News. A trace of the guns’ serial numbers revealed that the weapons had been purchased 11 months earlier at a Phoenix-area gun store by a Fast and Furious suspect. The attackers fled, leaving behind two semiautomatic rifles. Border Patrol unit and killed an agent named Brian Terry. In a remote stretch of Peck Canyon, Ariz., Mexican bandits attacked an elite U.S. 14, 2010, a tragic event rewrote the narrative of the investigation. But for the next seven months prosecutors did not indict a single suspect. Attorney’s office a list of 31 suspects they wanted to arrest, with 46 pages outlining their illegal acts. By June 2010 the agents had sent the U.S. ![]() (They named it after the street-racing movie because the suspects drag raced cars together.) Their greatest difficulty by far, however, was convincing prosecutors that they had sufficient grounds to seize guns and arrest straw purchasers. The agents faced numerous obstacles in what they dubbed the Fast and Furious case. “In Arizona,” says Voth, “someone buying three guns is like someone buying a sandwich.” There are no waiting periods and no need for permits, and buyers are allowed to resell the guns. Billboards advertise volume discounts for multiple purchases.Ĭustomers can legally buy as many weapons as they want in Arizona as long as they’re 18 or older and pass a criminal background check. Voth’s mandate was to stop gun traffickers in Arizona, the state ranked by the gun-control advocacy group Legal Community Against Violence as having the nation’s “weakest gun violence prevention laws.” Just 200 miles from Mexico, which prohibits gun sales, the Phoenix area is home to 853 federally licensed firearms dealers. But as Voth left to become the group supervisor of Phoenix Group VII, a friend warned him: “You’re destined to fail.” He was the “hardest working federal agent I’ve come across,” says John Biederman, a sergeant with the Minneapolis Police Department. In 2009 the ATF named him outstanding law-enforcement employee of the year for dismantling two violent street gangs in Minneapolis. Strapping and sandy-haired, the former Marine is cool-headed and punctilious to a fault. Voth, 39, was a good choice for a Sisyphean task. The National Rifle Association has so successfully opposed a comprehensive electronic database of gun sales that the ATF’s congressional appropriation explicitly prohibits establishing one. For six years, due to Beltway politics, the bureau has gone without permanent leadership, neutered in its fight for funding and authority. No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking within the U.S., so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws. ![]() The ATF is hobbled in its effort to stop this flow. ![]() Some call it the “parade of ants” others the “river of iron.” The Mexican government has estimated that 2,000 weapons are smuggled daily from the U.S. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |