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There are only 2400 special agents in the ATF and part of their duties are divided between alcohol and tobacco issues http://www.whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?ForumID=530&TopicID=
463791&ThreadID=10096865

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The agency still has about the same number of agents it had nearly four decades ago: 2,500. The firearms bureau inspects only a fraction of the nation's 60,000 retail gun dealers, taking as much as eight years between visits to stores. By law, the ATF cannot require dealers to conduct a physical inventory to determine whether any guns have been lost or stolen. MUCH more at http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/faced-with-powerful-gun-lobby-head
less-regulatory-agency-keeps-gun-tracing-

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• There are ~14,869 more gun stores in America than grocery stores. Specifically, there are 51,438 gun retailers and 36,536 grocery stores.

• There are almost as many gun dealers in America as gas stations. There are a total of 129,817 gun dealers in the country, which include retail stores (51,438), "collectors" (61,562), pawn shops (7,356), and importers and manufacturers. Meanwhile, there are 143,849 gas stations.

• There are more than twice as many gun stores in America as McDonalds restaurants. There are only 14,098 McDonaldsRead more: http://www.businessinsider.com/more-gun-stores-in-america-than-grocery
-stores-2012-12#ixzz2JCFD2oJq]

The Washington Post did an investigative series on the issue ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/guns/]) and some of the results are pretty amazing. Here's just a TINY taste:

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Maryland gun store tied to 2,500 crime guns

Dixon's Glock was one of 86 guns sold by Realco that have been linked to homicide cases during the past 18 years, far outstripping the total from any other store in the region, a Washington Post investigation has found. Over that period, police have recovered more than 2,500 guns sold by the shop

Realco's firearms end up at local crime scenes at a rate nearly twice that of any other active Maryland dealer that had 10 or more guns seized.

On a single day, police have logged two, three or even four guns sold by Realco, records show.

The Post investigation found that a small percentage of gun stores sells most of the weapons recovered by police in crimes - re-confirming the major finding of studies that came out before federal gun-tracing data were removed from public view by an act of Congress in 2003

The investigation also found that:

--Nearly two out of three guns sold in Virginia since 1998 and recovered by local authorities came from about 1 percent of the state's dealers - 40 out of the 3,400 selling guns. Most of those 40 had received government warnings that their licenses were in jeopardy because of regulatory violations. But only four had their licenses revoked, and all are still legally selling guns after transferring their licenses, reapplying or re-licensing under new owners.

-- In Maryland, Realco towers over the other 350 handgun dealers in the state as a source of guns confiscated in the District and Prince George's County, the most violent jurisdictions in the area. Nearly one out of three guns The Post traced to Maryland dealers came from Realco. Excerpts from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/23/AR2010
102302994.html

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How politics protect gun dealers; why we know less about crime gun sales than we did 10 years ago.

Industry pressure hides gun traces, protects dealers from public scrutiny. Under the law, investigators cannot reveal federal firearms tracing information that shows how often a dealer sells guns that end up seized in crimes. The law effectively shields retailers from lawsuits, academic study and public scrutiny. It also keeps the spotlight off the relationship between rogue gun dealers and the black market in firearms.

Such information used to be available under a simple Freedom of Information Act request. But seven years ago, under pressure from the gun lobby, Congress blacked out the information by passing the so-called Tiahrt amendment, named for Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.). The law removed from the public record a government database that traces guns recovered in crimes back to the dealers.

"It was extraordinary, and the most offensive thing you can think of," said Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit group for police chiefs. "The tracing data, which is now secret, helped us see the big picture of where guns are coming from."

The amendment also kept the data from being used by cities and interest groups to sue the firearms industry, an avenue of attack modeled after the lawsuits against tobacco companies. "

The proposal surprised some members of the House Appropriations Committee when it came up for a vote in July 2003. As a result, it barely passed, 31-30, though the committee was full of NRA supporters such as Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), who voted no because he was troubled at being "caught flat-footed and blindsided."

After the vote, Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) objected. "It was not the subject of hearings. It has no support from law enforcement. It has no support from the Attorney General. It really serves to protect only the most corrupt gun dealers at the expense of all other legitimate gun dealers."

For three decades, tracing was used mostly to help police catch criminals linked to recovered guns. But in 1995, Professor Glenn L. Pierce of Northeastern University analyzed ATF tracing data and discovered that a tiny fraction of gun dealers - 1 percent - were the original sellers of a majority of the guns seized at crime scenes - 57 percent.

In 2000, Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, who oversaw the ATF, announced "intensive inspections" of the 1 percent - 1,012 gun stores. The inspections detected serious problems. Nearly half of the dealers could not account for all of their guns, for a total of 13,271 missing firearms. More than half were out of compliance with record-keeping. And they had made nearly 700 sales to potential traffickers or prohibited people.

The ATF proposed tougher rules, such as requiring dealers to conduct regular inventories to detect lost or stolen guns. The gun industry opposed the rule.

To break through the federal secrecy imposed by the Tiahrt amendment, The Post obtained hundreds of thousands of state and local police records and did its own tracing and analysis. Excerpts from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/23/AR2010
102302996.html

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Sellers shut down by ATF find other ways

Gun dealers often stay in business with new licenses after ATF shuts them down. "We'll just have to play musical licenses," the owner of the Highland Gun Barn in Michigan said when a federal inspector served him with a final notice to surrender his license.

A California sports shop had its license revoked after inspectors from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said the 87-year-old owner's repeated violations of gun laws showed she was unable to run a gun business. Before she forfeited her license, the woman's son obtained a permit to sell guns at the same shop. He said he would be at the shop two days a week and that his mother would "exclusively direct all day-to-day business."

A Georgia gun dealer had its license revoked after ATF said it could not account for hundreds of guns. The dealer's daughter and son-in-law secured their own license and jeot the business going.

It is all legal.

"This is the way Congress wrote the law," said James Zammillo, who was with ATF for four decades and served as deputy assistant director of industry operations before retiring this year. "The spirit of the law is that unless the applicant is prohibited, you have to issue a license. There is no discretion."

Revoking a gun dealer's license is ATF's most aggressive enforcement action short of criminal prosecution. It is a rare last resort for less than one-quarter of 1 percent of dealers annually. It often follows years of warnings for serious violations and sometimes leads to years of appeals. Although gun dealers complain that ATF harps on clerical errors, the agency says it revokes licenses only when dealers continually fail to comply with gun laws and the violations threaten public safety.

At the heart of the issue is the fact that the 1968 Gun Control Act treats each new license applicant as a unique entity - even if it is a similarly named company with the same employees. As long as the applicant is a different individual or business entity, ATF cannot consider violations incurred under a former licensee when weighing the new application. Embattled operations can be reborn with a clean slate at the same location trading under the same business name.

The agency might spend years in court revoking a license from a troubled dealer but by law must approve licenses to eligible applicants within 60 days.

Richard Gardiner, a former counsel for the National Rifle Association who has defended many dealers in ATF revocations, said family members, friends or associates who were not directly involved in the old license are legally entitled to their own licenses. "It's not a loophole," he said.

Current and former officials say troubled dealers have increasingly resorted to the tactic. "Our field people get very frustrated," said Teresa Ficaretta, deputy assistant director for enforcement programs and services at ATF. "Based on the phone calls I get from the field, this is happening more often." The agency, she said, has been working to train attorneys and inspectors how to identify and legally block these cases, but it is extremely difficult and time-consuming.

The new applicants were often family members or newly created businesses with similar-sounding names. In some cases, new applicants told ATF they took steps to remove the person responsible for prior problems. In other cases, former licensees were listed as employees, consultants, shareholders or landlords.Excerpts from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/13/AR2010
121305890.html?sid=ST2010121305901

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And that's just the tip of the iceburg.

There is also the "Firesale Loophole", which allows gun dealers, when they lose their license, TO CONTINUE TO SELL THEIR INVENTORYAS "PRIVATE COLLECTIONS" WITHOUT BACKGROUND CHECKS!

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WHAT IS THE FIRESALE LOOPHOLE?

When the federal government has shut down a gun dealer for selling illegally, it has nevertheless permitted that dealer to sell off its inventory - without conducting background checks.

Even after ATF revokes a gun dealer's license for chronic non-compliance with federal law, it has allowed dealers to sell their remaining guns without recordkeeping or background checks - by transferring hundreds guns from their "business inventory" into their "personal collections."Excerpt from http://www.mayorsagainstillegalguns.org/html/federal/dealer_firesales.
shtml

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Here's just one example:

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His store once sold about 3,000 firearms a year. "Human error" was the way Abrams described most of his store's mistakes. "I'm not doing something illegal," he said. But in February, U.S. District Judge William M. Nickerson in Baltimore ruled that while Abrams "may challenge the numerousness or seriousness of its violations of federal firearms law, [he] makes no credible argument that there were no violations. The undisputed fact is that because of [Valley Gun's] lapses, scores of firearms are unaccounted for, and therefore, untraceable," the judge ruled.

...the office of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia said that Abrams could sell off his existing stock legally if he didn't buy new weapons. When a dealer loses his license he can dispose of his inventory by selling those firearms without breaking the law.

The news that Abrams, whom federal prosecutors in Maryland labeled a "serial violator" of gun regulations, can still sell hundreds of guns alarmed critics such as Vice of the Brady Center. "This isn't a personal collection," Vice said. "This is an inventory of a gun shop." Excerpts from http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2006-07-13/news/0607130118_1_abrams-g
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SOME gun dealers have incentives to abide by the law. As is obvious from the above, others do not, pay no price for the fraud they commit, and provide by FAR the most guns used in crimes.

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I'd say that when you get your 'facts' from somewhere like an editorial in Mother Jones, you probably need to do some checking at a slightly more unbiased source before taking it as gospel.

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Nice snark. Putting "facts" in quotes doesn't change that they ARE facts.

Your cute little snark is irrelevant; I did ask that you refute the FACTS presented. Those sources were just what covered the issue most concisely, and are accurate; I dug deeper to find the material from investigative reporters and other sources you MIGHT find less "unbiased" (tho' I doubt it; nothing will be acceptable to you and those like you). I take nothing as gospel from anywhere, and I mistrust the sources you didn't like more than others, which is why I look further. The articles I put up initially were the most comprehensive and concise, but I searched around to provide excerpts from many other sources saying the same things.

It's obvious (and there's tons more, I'm just offering some of the most egregious situations) that there are serious problems with how guns are sold in this country, the NRA has helped make it impossible for data to be made available, and has worked tirelessly and quite competently to protect illegal gun dealers and stymie the ATF. Those facts are patently obvious.

Please refute the FACTS--no, wait, go right ahead and snark and reject whatever you want, it only shows YOUR bias.

Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.

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taking as much as eight years between visits to stores.

By law, the ATF cannot require dealers to conduct a physical inventory to determine whether any guns have been lost or stolen .

Federal gun-tracing data were removed from public view by an act of Congress

Nearly half of the dealers could not account for all of their guns, for a total of 13,271 missing firearms

...the way Congress wrote the law. There is no discretion

The agency might spend years in court revoking a license from a troubled dealer but by law must approve licenses to eligible applicants within 60 days .

...permits dealers to sell off their inventory - without conducting background checks.

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your statement that "The penalty for fraud by licensed gun dealers is now a misdemeanor..." is deceiving, because actual illegal sales are still a felony punishable by fine and up to five years in prison.

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