If you’re a beleaguered federal agency hated by tens of millions of Americans, you would think that you would do everything you could to change your image. But the people who work at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) aren’t that bright. And so they continue to shove their feet into their mouths at every opportunity.
On Valentine’s Day, ATF’s social media team posted a tweet asking people to report on their exes if they were involved in any “illegal gun activity.” The account promised it would give those people a “Valentine’s Day to remember.”
How anyone at the agency could have thought this was a good idea is unbelievable. And the tweet naturally came in for the kind of abuse it so rightfully deserved. As many pointed out, it was just asking for disgruntled former lovers to rat someone out who was engaged in perfectly legal activity, in essence SWATing them.
More importantly, however, is the fact that our “law enforcement” agencies are no longer hiding the fact that they couldn’t care less about our Constitutional rights. Not only are they perfectly happy to stomp all over our 2nd Amendment rights, they’re also willing to engage in draconian tactics to do so, taking a page right out of East Germany’s Stasi.
The Stasi were infamous for encouraging family members to inform on each other, a tactic they learned from Hitler’s Gestapo. Family relationships were torn apart after revelations of informing became public after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And you would think that those of us in the West would have learned our lesson from East Germany.
But apparently the geniuses at ATF either forgot about East Germany or came of age after the Cold War, and thus fail to realize that they’re acting just like jackbooted communist thugs. It can’t be too soon before America’s most hated government agency, just like the Soviet Union, is relegated to the dustbin of history.
