BATFU and the Wide Open Spaces

The ATF has issued a new 4473 form, this is the form that you must fill out in order to purchase a firearm.

Ryan Horsley of Red's Trading Post gives us the lowdown on the lowdown BATFU Harassment Agency's latest incarnation of their damnable Citizen gun owner registration record.

If I was Ryan's lawyer, I'd be asking DIO Richard Van Loan under oath why they widened the "Yes/No" entry spaces on the form in 2001, after Ryan's 2000 audit where many of the "violations" were found. That's nothing less than an official admission that the old form didn't have enough room to comply with writing the words out, practically necessitating a "Y" or "N" entry, and it seems Judge Lodge ought to be taking that into consideration.

Still, seeing as how BATFU has nothing better to do than penalize businesses for not doing exactly as ordered, no matter how petty or ridiculous, I wonder if they could cite a dealer for a violation if they didn't ensure quotation marks around the "Yes" or "No," as specified on the form instruction?

And there's one other thing no one else seems to be talking about. Ryan presents three versions of Form 4473 beginning in 1997. The 2005 revision shows an interesting major change, one that I believe was introduced in 2001. (Unexplained is why the official sample presented on BATFU's website has a revision date of "10-2001". They demand perfect compliance, and this is the quality of their information resources?)

Why did BATFU start compiling statistics on what race a gun owner is? Of what relevance is that, and who authorized them to require racial profiling as a precondition to buying a gun? Could the federal government enforce the same requirement for, say, voting?

And here's one of the better illustrations of bureaucratic incompetence I've seen in a long time: In this time of the "war on terror," when Sarah Brady et al. are railing about Middle Eastern terrorists exploiting "the gun show loophole" to procure unregistered .50BMGs that can shoot down the Starship Enterprise, does anybody see a category on BATFU's new "racing form" for...uh...Middle Easterners?

If we're all going to be forced into the cattle car, why do they get a pass? Hey, if you're going to classify Semitic people as "White," why is there a separate Hispanic/Latino category? If I were a Middle Easterner, I'd be offended if someone tried to lump me in with Europeans.

But really--how, in post-9/11 America--can BATFU possibly justify documenting gun purchases by Pacific Islanders, but not by people of Arab descent? And is this just more stupid, or is it intentional?

What this means is, if you refuse to allow the government to register your race (unless you're a Sunni from Fallujah?), they can deny your right to keep and bear arms. Since when has BATFU been given authority to do that, and who has the authority to give it to them?

I smell a potential lawsuit here. At the very least, it'd be fun to monkeywrench the bastards and publicly force them to go through another form change immediately after going through the expense and hoopla of issuing their latest revision.