Sipsey Street Irregulars: The Gunwalker Scandal and the Birmingham News. The letter they printed and the letter they didn't.

Monday, July 18, 2011

The Gunwalker Scandal and the Birmingham News. The letter they printed and the letter they didn't.

Carol Robinson, Birmingham Snooze reporter.

My sincere thanks to Jack Hart for writing our local paper, the Birmingham Snooze, this LTE. It was printed in yesterday's paper:

The July 11 column in The Birmingham News by Mary Sanchez of the Kansas City Star ("Cops, robbers and ... politics," Other Views) is just another example of the bias of journalists.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, an arm of the U.S. Justice Department, allowed multiple illegal gun transactions from legitimate gun stores in Arizona even though the store owners reported them to ATF. ATF told the owners it would take care of it. In reality, the ATF allowed these purchases and didn't pursue the criminals because it had a program operating that was supposed to track the illegal firearms purchased to Mexico.

Yet, ATF didn't notify the single agent in Mexico or the Mexican government. So it's obvious to me ATF was just waiting for the illegal guns to come back across the border and be used to commit a crime. The crime was committed; a U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed.

This program by ATF was obviously illegal and in total disregard to human life. If the bureau had followed the law, these people who made these "straw" purchases would be locked up and facing a minimum of 10-year consecutive sentences in federal prisons, and lives would have been saved.

Jack Hart

Alabaster

That was the letter they printed. Here is a letter they didn't print:

-----Original Message-----
From: georgemason1776
To: epage
Cc: crobinson ; rfine
Sent: Mon, Jul 11, 2011 11:39 am
Subject: Birmingham Snooze coverage of Gunwalker Scandal abysmal -- as usual.

To the Editor
re: "Cops, Robbers and . . . politics." by Mary Sanchezs (BN, 11 July 2011)

It is typical of what the Birmingham News has descended to that you should print an op-ed blaming the motives on the Congressional investigators of what has become known as the "Gunwalker Scandal" on "politics." This has become the pitiful excuse of Obama administration minions in Congress and the press while attempting to defend the indefensible.

The News, to my knowledge, has taken no editorial position of its own on the bloody federal misadventure which has to date claimed the lives of at least two federal law enforcement officers and hundreds of Mexican citizens. Neither has the News done any original reporting of its own on this issue, although there are local and Alabama tie-ins. Your editors and your crime reporter, Carol Robinson, have ignored the story, despite repeated tips.

It is, in all, a pretty pitiful performance of non-reportage, but it represents everything we have come to expect from the Birmingham Snooze.

Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson, AL 35126

It should be noted that Ms. Robinson used to be married to a federal agent and her reportage is in some ways dependent upon friendly relations with the local Feds.

2 comments:

Mickey Collins said...: "Authorized journalists" don't like to publish statements denouncing themselves, and that goes double (triple?) for statements that are backed up by provable facts.; July 18, 2011 at 11:51 AM
ReasonableHeck said...: Well one thing we know - this is just a lie: "The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, an arm of the U.S. Justice Department, allowed multiple illegal gun transactions from legitimate gun stores in Arizona even though the store owners reported them to ATF."

The sales were legal under Arizona law. The transfer of those guns to someone else is legal UNDER ARIZONA LAW. Those gun sales have been going on for years without or without the ATF watching. The gun stores who "reporter" the sales to ATF have nothing to fear except not reporting - which is required.

The stupid stuff people say can be amazing.; July 17, 2012 at 4:26 PM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Monday, July 18, 2011

The Gunwalker Scandal and the Birmingham News. The letter they printed and the letter they didn't.

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