From: [c d t] at [sw.stratus.com] (C. D. Tavares)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: BATF as White Knight
Date: 21 Mar 1995 18:11:47 GMT
Rich Cower was nice enough to send me Appendix G from the Koresh
investigation, which I have scanned in and included below. It's
a sobering look at ATF as seen through the eyes of those who are
perfectly comfortable with statism and centralism. Particularly
chilling is the first half of the last paragraph. Enjoy, if you
can...
(Any errors due to scanning are inadvertent and regretted.)
A BRIEF HISTORY OF FEDERAL FIREARMS ENFORCEMENT
Frederick S. Calhoun. Ph.D.
Historian
Federal Law Enforcement Training Center
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) is a relatively
young law enforcement organization, having been created formally in
1972. Yet, measured by the federal laws related to the regulation
and taxing of alcohol, tobacco, and firearms-the laws ATF now
enforces-the history of the bureau's duties and responsibilities
stretches across the full two centuries of American history. As early
as 1791, revenue acts taxed both alcohol and tobacco and created the
offices of tax inspector, collector, and supervisor. During the next
century, the offices changed names as frequently as the tax rates
changed, but the federal interest in raising revenues from alcohol
and tobacco remained strong. Indeed, the formal organization of an
independent bureau within the Department of Treasury specializing
in alcohol, tobacco, and firearms law enforcement belatedly
recognized the distinct need for such an agency.
After the Civil War, revenue agents battled moonshiners throughout
the South in some of the bloodiest opposition ever to federal law
enforcement. Revenue agents and deputy U.S. marshals by the score
were killed as they roamed the hills and hollows searching out illicit
stills. Prohibition changed the government's focus from taxing
whiskey to banning it, yet the revenue agent's job remained as
dangerous. After experimenting in social adjustment a dozen years,
Prohibition was rescinded. Spawned by the 1933 repeal of
Prohibition, the Alcohol Tax Unit was established as a tax-collecting
branch within the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Continued concern over the violent, organized mobs that plagued the
major cities compelled the federal government to try to curb the
gangsters' ability to arm themselves. Rather than ban outright the
purchase of machine guns and sawed-off shotguns-the weapons of
choice for the mobsters-Congress in 1934 simply imposed a tax
those weapons. Paying the tax required registering the weapon. The
registration requirement was intended to discourage ownership of
such weapons without outlawing them. No self-respecting gangster
would want to register, much less pay the tax, on his Tommygun.
Their evasion of the tax gave the government another legal tool to
use in arresting the gangsters and breaking up the mobs.
Because it was a tax rather than a prohibition, it fell to Treasury to
enforce the law as part of Treasury's role in collecting all funds due
the government. Within Treasury, the Alcohol Tax Unit seemed the
logical branch to enforce the new law. Registering and taxing stills
required many of the same procedures and investigatory talents that
would be needed to register and tax weapons. In the end, the new
assignment proved comparatively easy. The unit was not
overwhelmed with registrations nor by the 1940s were the
investigations into evasions of the tax very time-consuming. As the
gangsters declined in number and power, so did their use of machine
guns and sawed-off shotguns. Enforcing the alcohol taxes again
occupied most of the unit's attention.
In 1951, the Alcohol Tax Unit began enforcing federal taxes on
tobacco, thus prompting a name change in 1952 to the Alcohol and
Tobacco Tax Division. Once again, the logic seemed to be that
collecting the tax on tobacco closely resembled the work necessary to
collect the tax on alcohol, machine guns, and sawed-off shotguns. The
1968 passage of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act and
the Gun Control Act expanded the IRS unit's jurisdiction to the
criminal use of explosives and bombs. The new laws also defined
specific federal offenses involving firearms, including transportation
across state lines and use in organized crimes. In recognition of this
new enforcement responsibility, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax
Division changed its name to the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms
Division (ATFD). Two years later, Congress passed the Explosives
Control Act defining certain bombings and acts of arson as federal
crimes. It assigned jurisdiction for enforcing this new law to ATFD.
With these expanded responsibilities. the Treasury Department on
July 1, 1972 created the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms
under the general oversight of the Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury for Enforcement, Tariffs and Trade, and Operations. For the
past twenty-one years, ATF has enforced the collection of federal
taxes on alcohol and tobacco and the federal controls and regulations
on firearms, with particular attention to their use by criminals.
Although on its face the bureau seems a discordant collection of
separate duties, the techniques for enforcing the taxes and ferreting
out the illicit products, whether cases of whiskey, cartons of
cigarettes, crates of automatic weapons, or containers of bombs, are
strikingly similar.
Subsequent laws have expanded ATF's jurisdiction. The 1976 Arms
Export Control Act focused the Bureau's attention on international
gun smuggling. The 1982 Anti-Arson Act gave ATF authority to
investigate the destruction of property by fire as well as by
explosives. Increased taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, and enhanced
regulatory measures such as the 1978 Contraband Cigarette Act,
have also enhanced the bureau's responsibility to ensure the
government receives its lawful taxes.
The bureau has been an effective force in law enforcement. Supplies
of illicit alcohol and smuggled tobacco have steadily decreased, and
tax revenues have risen. During 1991, for example, ATF collected
$7.7 billion in alcohol taxes and $4.8 billion in tobacco taxes. ATF
agents have also focused on tracking down armed career criminals
and criminal gang members. Investigations in Florida resulted in the
arrest of 45 Warlock motorcycle gang members in 1991. Members of
the Gullymen Posse, a gang of Jamaican drug dealers known for its
propensity to commit murder, were arrested in New York by ATF
agents in January 1991. Similarly, an ATF investigation into the
activities of the Born to Kill gang culminated in the arrest of a dozen
gang members in August 1991. Sixteen members of the San Diego
chapter of the Hells Angels were convicted in 1992. As a result of
these and similar investigations, ATF has become the nation's
principal repository for gang-related information and intelligence.
The bureau has also earned an excellent reputation for working well
with federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.
ATF agents also specialize in identifying anonymous bombers by
their "signature" habits in making bombs. For example, in 1990, the
assassin of Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert Vance was
ultimately identified by ATF agents who recognized the way the
bomb was constructed. Similarly, in the midst of the tragedy in Waco,
Texas, ATF agents investigating the World Trade Center bombing
helped to identify the van that was used to hold the bomb. This early
identification led FBI agents to the rental car company and thereafter
to arrests of the terrorists before they could escape the country.
The bureau has developed considerable expertise in arson
investigations. At the request of the National Fire Protection Agency,
ATF began developing nationwide standards for fire investigators.
The State Department's Diplomatic Security Service invited ATF to
develop a protocol establishing an International Response Team of
investigators trained to search blast scenes involving U.S. property
abroad. Despite a rather eclectic array of duties, ATF has succeeded
in developing considerable expertise in each area of its enforcement
responsibilities.
The raid by ATF agents on the Branch Davidian compound resulted
from its enforcement of contemporary federal firearms laws. In a
larger sense, however, the raid fit within an historic, well-established
and well-defended government interest in prohibiting and breaking
up all organized groups that sought to arm or fortify themselves. The
1934 law taxing weapons was only the first time the federal
government addressed private ownership of weapons; it was not the
first federal effort to control firearms. From its earliest formation,
the federal government has actively suppressed any effort by
disgruntled or rebellious citizens to coalesce into an armed group,
however small the group, petty its complaint, or grandiose its
ambition. The collection of large arsenals by organized groups lent
itself, ultimately, to the violent use of those weapons against the
government itself or portions of its citizenry. Indeed, federal agents
who tried to disband the groups frequently became the targets.
The discomfort over armed organizations predated the Constitution.
The outbreak of what became known as Shays' Rebellion in 1786
gave added urgency to the establishment of a strong national
government. During the rebellion, hundreds of angry Massachusetts
farmers, most veterans of the Revolution and facing foreclosures on
their farms, banded together to keep the courts from issuing any
executions. Calling themselves Regulators, the farmers quickly
organized into a small army. Significantly, their first foray was to
capture the arsenal at Springfield. Although the Regulators failed, the
specter survived. Five months, delegates from each of the thirteen
states met in Philadelphia to design a new experiment in
government.
The lesson of Shays' Rebellion was not forgotten, even after the new
government was formed. In 1792, Congress passed a law
empowering the president to call out the state militias to suppress
insurrections if either an associate justice of the Supreme Court or a
local district court judge certified that opposition to the laws was
beyond the powers of the civil authority to suppress. Ironically, the
first occasion to resort to that law grew out of the violent, organized,
and armed resistance to the federal government's whiskey tax. Thus,
two of the duties that ATF would later inherent-enforcing alcohol
taxes and controlling firearms-combusted in 1794 into the Whiskey
Rebellion, the first violent opposition to the new federal
government.[1]
Across the next century, succeeding presidents had sporadic, though
no less fearsome, occasion to dispatch the Army and the state militias
to suppress various outbreaks of armed opposition to federal laws,
taxes. and interests. In 1799, Fries Rebellion against a federal tax on
houses forced President John Adams to muster the militia. Fugitive
slave rescues during the 1850s prompted the government to call out
the military. Organized resistance in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,
New York, Ohio, and Wisconsin raised a troublesome specter. "The
main opposition," President Millard Fillmore warned Congress in
December 1851, "is aimed against the Constitution itself." At the end
of the decade, John Brown's ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry,. Virginia,
sparked the government to decisive action. Brown chose Harper's
Ferry because of the federal arsenal there. His intent was to
distribute the weapons among Southern slaves and lead them in
revolt for their freedom. Federal troops, however, thwarted the
plan.[2]
After the Civil War, the federal government battled unrepentant
Southerners to protect the rights of the freedmen. Nonetheless.
federal officials acted only after the innumerable Klan-style attacks
were finally perceived as organized. "Outrages of various
descriptions." Attorney General George Williams advised southern
U.S. Attorneys and Marshals in 1874. "and in some cases atrocious
murders have been committed in your district by bodies of armed
men. sometimes in disguise and with the view it is believed of
overawing and intimidating peaceable and law abiding citizens and
depriving them of the rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution
and laws of the United States." The attorney general ordered his
attorneys and marshals "to detect, expose. arrest, and punish the
perpetrators of these crimes."[3]
Throughout the western territories and along the Mexican border,
the federal government found occasional need to suppress armed
bands of outlaws, ganged together to steal cattle or rob the mails.
General William Tecumseh Sherman. sent to the Arizona border in
April 1882 to investigate the outlaw troubles there, advised
President Chester A. Arthur that "the Civil Officers have not
sufficient forces to make arrests, to hold prisoners for trial or punish
when convicted." The President promptly proclaimed on May 31 that
the areas plagued by the outlaws were in a state of rebellion.[4]
The federal government looked no more kindly on the labor strikes
that broke out in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the
opening years of the twentieth. What seemed so dangerous about
events such as the 1894 Pullman strike was not just the disruption of
the mails, which was the legal basis on which the government relied
to break the strike, but the fact that the mails were being violently
disrupted by organized groups. "We have been brought to the ragged
edge of anarchy," Attorney General Richard Olney frantically
explained when he ordered that the trains be kept running.
Eventually, Eugene Debs and his colleagues in the American Railway
Union, which took the lead in the strike, were indicted and convicted.
Once again, it was the volatile mixture of violence and organization-
combinations determined difficult to suppress-that evoked the full
power of the federal government.[5]
The passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934, the first federal
effort to control private ownership of firearms, grew out of this
historic fear of armed organizations. The various collections of
gangsters that proliferated during Prohibition were the true targets
of the law, which required a tax and registration on the sale of their
weapons of choice-machine guns and sawed-off shotguns.
Subsequent federal firearms laws have been of a piece. Other than
the 1968 ban on mail-order sales, which was in direct, though
delayed, response to the assassination of President Kennedy, federal
gun laws have typically been concerned with the weapons of
considerable destructive power generally preferred by organized
groups-bombs, machine guns, and automatic weapons.
In recent times, the federal government has shown itself even less
patient with armed groups than it had historically. Radical extremists
of both the Right and the Left have been pursued aggressively once
they began breaking the law. For instance, after the Symbionese
Liberation Army (SLA) launched its self-styled "people's war" by
kidnapping newspaper heiress Patty Hearst and committing a
number of daring bank robberies, the federal government dedicated
its full resources to tracking the group down. Within approximately
three months, FBI agents and Los Angeles police closed in on the
group at a house just outside what was then known as Watts. During
an intense gun battle and fire, every member of the SLA in the house
was killed.[6]
Gordon Kahl, who stood at the opposite end of the political spectrum
from the SLA, met a similar end. Kahl belonged to the Posse
Comitatus which refused to recognize the authority of any
government above the county level. Accordingly, Kahl consistently
refused to pay his federal taxes, even after he served time in prison
for not doing so. When U.S. Marshals attempted to arrest him for
violating the terms of his probation, Kahl killed two of them. For the
next five months, Kahl hid among his friends and sympathizers until
FBI agents located him in a farmhouse just outside Smithville,
Arkansas. After refusing to surrender, Kahl was killed, and the
farmhouse was burned down.[7]
Robert Matthews, the head of a group of right-wing fanatics known
as the Order, embraced many of Kahl's beliefs. Unlike Kahl, whose
resistance was essentially passive until the marshals tried to arrest
him, Matthews and the Order launched an aggressive private war
against the country. Like the SLA, the Order committed a series of
bank and armored car robberies, netting $3.6 million in one heist
alone. The Order also assassinated Alan Berg, a radio talk show host
in Denver, Colorado.
The FBI began an equally aggressive pursuit. After a brief, violent
skirmish in Idaho and another in Portland, Oregon, FBI agents finally
closed in on Matthews hiding out among three adjoining houses on
Whidbey Island, some fifty miles north of Seattle. After negotiating
his surrender for two days, Matthews began firing on an FBI Hostage
Response Team that attempted to enter the house. Protected by a full
suit( of body armor, Matthews ran from the first floor to the second
floor firing automatic weapons. The FBI dropped a magnesium flare
from a helicopter. The flare landed on the roof of the house and
burned through it to the room where Matthews had stored his
ammunition and explosives. These ignited, setting off a roaring,
exploding fire that consumed Matthews.[8]
A year later, in the spring of 1985. ATF collected considerable
evidence that an 80-member group styling itself the Covenant of the
Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) had stockpiled a large arsenal
at its fortified compound in Arkansas. The group had collected over
150 firearms, (including 35 machine guns), two anti-personnel
mines, three anti-aircraft rockets, 50 pounds of military plastic
explosives, 300 blasting caps, 2,000 feet of detonating cord, and
around 100 explosive devices. CSA had also stockpiled food, water,
and supplies.
ATF led the assault on the CSA compound on April 20, 1985. CSA
members retreated farther into the compound, barricading
themselves behind their defenses. The agents set up a siege
perimeter and settled in to wait. The group used the wait to destroy
many of the weapons (and hence evidence) illegally obtained.
Negotiators from the FBI arrived and began the tedious, frustrating
process of talking the group out. Three days later, on April 22, 1985,
James D. Ellison and the 75 members of the CSA surrendered.[9]
As both history and recent events clearly show, the United States has
never tolerated armed groups residing within its borders. The intent
of the particular organization, whether ideological or criminal,
mattered little. If the group was building an illegal arsenal, the group
was subject to a federal enforcement action. To this day, ATF's
enforcement focus retains the flavor of that historic concern with
armed organizations. The agency has developed considerable
expertise and success in investigating the activities of motorcycle,
street, and drug gangs, all of which share in common a proclivity to
amass large arsenals of powerful weapons. The raid on the Branch
Davidian compound occurred in the context of that historical
background.
[1] Bowen, Miracle at Philadelphia, p. 287; Frederick S. Calhoun, The
Lawmen: United Slates Marshals and Their Deputies, 1789-1989,
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), p. 32.
[2] Fillmore quoted in W.U. Hensel, The Christiana Rio and the
Treason Trials of 1851: An Historical Sketch. (New York: Negro
Universities Press, 1911), pp. 92-3; Calhoun, The Lawmen. pp. 82-93.
[3] Attorney General George Williams, circular letter to U.S. Attorneys
and Marshals, September 3, 1874, Attorney General Instruction Book
E, Record Group 60, Records of the Department of Justice, National
Archives.
[4] General William Tecumseh Sherman to Attorney General
Benjamin Brewster, April 12, 1882, Source-Chronological Files,
Record Group 60, National Archives; Calhoun, The Lawmen, p. 196;
Larry Ball, United States Marshals of Arizona and New Mexico, 1846-
1912. (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), pp.
125-6.
[5] Almont Lindsey, The Pullman Strike, (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1967), p. 245, 274-92; Calhoun, The Lawmen, 209,
214.
[6] Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1974.
[7] James Corcoran, Bitter Harvest Gordon Kahl and the Posse
Comitatus: Murder in The Heartland. (New York: Viking Press, 1990).
[8] James Coates, Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist
Right, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), pp. 41-76.
[9] James Coates, Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist
Right, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), pp. 1424.
(Scanned in from: *US Government Printing Office: 1993-358-365)
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