Monday, September 12, 2011

Gun store owner had misgivings about ATF sting

Gun store owner had misgivings about ATF sting

My God! This is/was wrong on so many levels. I suppose in the end,once it's forgotten, but by a few it will be yesterdays news.
bpb

By Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times

September 11, 2011, 9:14 p.m.
Reporting from Glendale and Rio Rico, Ariz.— In the fall of 2009, ATF agents installed a secret phone line and hidden cameras in a ceiling panel and wall at Andre Howard's Lone Wolf gun store. They gave him one basic instruction: Sell guns to every illegal purchaser who walks through the door.

For 15 months, Howard did as he was told. To customers with phony IDs or wads of cash he normally would have turned away, he sold pistols, rifles and semiautomatics. He was assured by the ATF that they would follow the guns, and that the surveillance would lead the agents to the violent Mexican drug cartels on the Southwest border.

When Howard heard nothing about any arrests, he questioned the agents. Keep selling, they told him. So hundreds of thousands of dollars more in weapons, including .50-caliber sniper rifles, walked out of the front door of his store in a Glendale, Ariz., strip mall.

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