ATF UNDER SIEGE

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The N.R.A.'s favorite strategy in harrying the agency is to publicize individual cases of alleged ATF abuses, in the process ignoring the thousands of investigations that conform even to the N.R.A.'s own anticrime platform. In 1994 ATF recommended 10,000 defendants for prosecution, of whom 47% were previously convicted felons. The bureau's critics also sidestep the fact that on the same day as the Waco raid, an ATF investigator, working with a New York City bomb-squad detective, found the vital shard of evidence that broke the World Trade Center bombing case. Agents from the bureau's office in Charlotte, North Carolina, recently took down a murderous street gang and sent a dozen members to prison, many for life terms. And last month Charlotte agents played a central role in capturing carjackers believed to have killed an Oregon businesswoman, the kind of case special agent in charge Paul Lyon sees as the bureau's "salvation." He feels Congress and the public have turned their back on ATF, even though the bureau is only trying to fulfill a mandate that Congress itself designated. "Now and for years, I have felt what people who came out of Vietnam felt," he says.

The N.R.A.'s atrocity stories typically omit details that might muddy its anti-ATF message. High on its list, for example, is the Randy Weaver case. In January 1991, ATF agents arrested Weaver for having sold two sawed-off shotguns to an ATF informant. Weaver was released on his own recognizance. When he failed to appear in court, a fugitive warrant was issued, and the case was passed to the U.S. Marshals Service, which caught up with Weaver in August 1992. A gunfight followed in which a deputy U.S. marshal and Weaver's 14-year-old son were killed. The FBI took over, and one of its snipers killed Weaver's wife. Contrary to public perception, however, ATF played no direct role in the shootings. In July 1993 a federal jury found Weaver guilty of failing to appear in court but acquitted him of the original weapons charge after his attorney, Gerry Spence, argued that ATF had entrapped him.

THE BUREAU HAS ALWAYS WALKED A DIFFICULT beat, one that lies at the heart of American ambivalence. Largely through historic accident, the agency acquired responsibility for regulating three of the nation's most popular yet dangerous products: booze, cigarettes and guns. Its forebears include the "revenuers" who hunted moonshiners and enforced Prohibition. Eliot Ness remains the bureau's chief institutional hero. Today large framed posters from the 1987 movie The Untouchables hang in many ATF offices.

The IRS agents became gun cops after a period of escalating violence prompted Congress in 1934 to regulate machine guns and certain other weapons. Their jurisdiction widened with the Gun Control Act of 1968, which barred felons, minors and others from buying guns and required licensed dealers to keep records of who bought their firearms. This new authority delighted the agents, who felt they had been promoted to real crime fighters, but top IRS officials viewed the combined role of tax collection and gun control as a public relations nightmare. So in 1972 the Treasury spun off ATF into a free-standing bureau.