Mayor Bloomberg vs. the Truth

Bloomberg, a Statist if there ever was one, has organized a bunch of Mayors to disseminate lies about the Tiahrt Amendment. The group includes Milk-Carton Tom of Milwaukee.

Bloomberg and his "mayors" have been claiming that the present ATFE budget rider somehow restricts ATFE from releasing trace data to local police (in fact, they're upset because it restricts releasing the data for purposes of their filing of civil suits against gunmakers, but they claim it impairs law enforcement use.)

There's another reason that the Mayors want that data: to identify gun-owners. As you will see, nothing prevents them from retaining the data once BATFE releases it...

Here's one example: "Dozens of mayors from around the country gathered Tuesday to urge the new Democratic Congress to fight crime by allowing wider tracking of illegal guns." Here's another: "When handguns with bullets that can pierce body armor showed up on the streets of New Jersey, Sen. Frank Lautenberg asked federal regulators to share data that could help local police figure out where the weapons were coming from. That information, the New Jersey Democrat was told, is off-limits....Insisting that gun trace data is an essential crime-fighting tool for cities, Bloomberg used his own funds as seed money, formed Mayors Against Illegal Guns and made repealing Tiahrt's amendment its number one issue this year."

So the BATFE had to step in and set the record straight:

Our agency routinely shares trace data with state and local law-enforcement agencies in support of investigations within their respective jurisdictions. Once a requesting agency receives law-enforcement-sensitive trace data from ATF, it becomes the agency's data to disseminate and share with other law-enforcement entities as it deems appropriate.

Let me be clear: neither the congressional language nor ATF rules prohibit the sharing of trace data with law enforcement conducting criminal investigations, or place any restrictions on the sharing of trace data with other jurisdictions once it is in the hands of state or local law enforcement. In fact, multi-jurisdictional trace data is also utilized by ATF and shared with fellow law-enforcement agencies to identify firearm-trafficking trends and leads. Additionally, nothing prohibits ATF from releasing our own reports that analyze trace-data trends that could be used by law enforcement."

Charlie Sykes speculated that Bloomberg could become the next President of the US. Anything's possible, I suppose.

But I never imagined that someone who is more explicitly Statist than Hillary Rodham Clinton would have a chance.