What does that mean, you ask?
Senior Special Agent Nicole Strong, an ATF spokeswoman, said Thursday that the ATF was asked to perform firearms traces but is leaving any investigative decisions up to the Waco Police Department and the McLennan County District Attorney’s Office.
“We have completed the firearms traces,” Strong said. “It is essentially tracking the life of the firearms, from the point it was manufactured, to who the first purchaser was — which is normally a licensed firearms dealer — to who the next purchaser was all the way down to the final purchase. How many times did it get bought and sold? We are complete with our end of it and, obviously, the investigation is a question for Waco PD. They just asked us to trace the guns.”
Strong said the guns were shipped to a lab in California for the ATF’s role in the investigation.
“The main goal was to see who the legal purchaser was,” she said. “We wanted to know if a gun went from a manufacturer to John Smith and that is the last known purchase, and then that gun ends up in the hands of one of the people in the Twin Peaks shooting who was in prohibited possession. We want to know how it went from a legal possession to an illegal possessor.”
So they want to know how a gun went from "a legal possession to an illegal possessor?" What does that have to do with solving the crimes, if any, committed by the owners of these firearms?
And why are we to believe that any of these guns were in the hands of illegal possessors? There is nothing in Texas law that makes it illegal for a member of a motorcycle club to own a gun.
And note also that after a great deal of unwarranted publicity about the weaponry seized at the crime scene, which we were at one point led to believe numbered in the thousands, the actual number of guns turned over to the ATF was 151. That includes a great many seized from vehicles after the fact which were never a factor in the actual shoot-out.
That might sound like a lot of guns, but a random search of vehicles in any Walmart parking lot in Texas would pass 151 in short order.
The think tank here at Falling Downs caught the unmistakable whiff of bullshit from the moment that first breaking news bulletin from Waco spilled onto the TV screen last May 17.
Ten months later, it's become an unbearable stench.
That might sound like a lot of guns, but a random search of vehicles in any Walmart parking lot in Texas would pass 151 in short order.
The think tank here at Falling Downs caught the unmistakable whiff of bullshit from the moment that first breaking news bulletin from Waco spilled onto the TV screen last May 17.
Ten months later, it's become an unbearable stench.
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