Missouri Republicans consider bill that would deny state jobs to federal agents who enforced gun laws. Because you know that makes sense.

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

Missouri Republicans are considering a bill that would bar federal law enforcement officials from state jobs if they ever enforced federal gun laws that the legislators consider ‘unconstitutional.’ 

According to the Missourian, GOP legislators would like to include a provision, in the so-called ‘Second Amendment Preservation Act,’ barring federal employees who enforce, or aid in a potential enforcement of certain gun-control laws in the course of their careers, from any Missouri state or local law enforcement jobs in the future.

So to be clear these idiots want to pass a law which denies future employment to a law enforcement official for doing his job. In short, if you do this job now, you cannot have this job later.

Pretty sure that is illegal for a number of reasons.

But get this, it's a compromise:

The latest provision is seen as a compromise by the Republican lawmakers from an earlier version that would have called for possible jail time or allowing civil damages stemming from lawsuits filed by Missourians who think an agent infringed upon their gun rights. 

The most recent version has been endorsed by the Senate General Laws Committee and would leave the civil penalties on the table in addition to the employment ban. 

The bill is likely to make the chamber floor for a vote. 

As currently written, Missourians would be able sue if they think a law enforcement officer was employed after being involved in the implementation of a federal gun law. If the lawsuit is successful, the agent would be fired and the state or municipality would be required to pay the resident’s court costs. 

“What we hope it accomplishes is for there to be a healthy degree of pause before anybody takes an action that could be unconstitutional,” said the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Brian Nieves, (R).

This of course is only in anticipation of a federal gun law being passed, which as of right now seems unlikely.  However if such a law were to pass THIS law would then be used to essentially threaten a federal agent into refusing to comply, by using the denial of future employment as a gun to their head.

That is pretty damn shocking.

I am still incredibly confused by this love affair that Americans have with firearms.

How in the hell did THAT amendment become the most important amendment in the Constitution?

I hear people talking about a "gun culture" and it makes me think of people who dress up like furries or breed and sell miniature horses or something. What exactly defines a "gun culture?"

I, of course, was born and raised in Alaska, where guns are ubiquitous. Yet when I was growing up they were seen as a tool for hunting, or a necessary purchase for self defense, and NOT so much a fetish, as they often are today.

I mean who lives their lives surrounded by firearms, talking about firearms, and fighting to keep their firearms, unless they are a collector of firearms, or a nut case?

And taking it to the extreme of potentially punishing law enforcement, is so completely out in left field, that I think it almost qualifies as a form of mass hysteria.

Mass hysteria over guns.

Yeah, nothing frightening about THAT!

The Truth about Fast and Furious. Update!

 Courtesy of Fortune:

Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn. 

Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time. 

How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It's a story that starts with a grudge, specifically Dodson's anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Rep. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election. (A Justice Department spokesperson denies this and asserts that the department is not drawing conclusions until the inspector general's report is submitted.) 

"Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false," says Linda Wallace, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service's criminal investigation unit who was assigned to the Fast and Furious team (and recently retired from the IRS). A self-described gun-rights supporter, Wallace has not been criticized by Issa's committee. 

The ATF's accusers seem untroubled by evidence that the policy they have pilloried didn't actually exist. "It gets back to something basic for me," says Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). "Terry was murdered, and guns from this operation were found at his murder site." A spokesman for Issa denies that politics has played a role in the congressman's actions and says "multiple individuals across the Justice Department's component agencies share responsibility for the failure that occurred in Operation Fast and Furious." Issa's spokesman asserts that even if ATF agents followed prosecutors' directives, "the practice is nonetheless gun walking." Attorneys for Dodson declined to comment on the record. 

For its part, the ATF would not answer specific questions, citing ongoing investigations. But a spokesperson for the agency provided a written statement noting that the "ATF did not exercise proper oversight, planning or judgment in executing this case. We at ATF have accepted responsibility and have taken appropriate and decisive action to insure that these errors in oversight and judgment never occur again." The statement asserted that the "ATF has clarified its firearms transfer policy to focus on interdiction or early intervention to prevent the criminal acquisition, trafficking and misuse of firearms," and it cited changes in coordination and oversight at the ATF. 

Irony abounds when it comes to the Fast and Furious scandal. But the ultimate irony is this: Republicans who support the National Rifle Association and its attempts to weaken gun laws are lambasting ATF agents for not seizing enough weapons—ones that, in this case, prosecutors deemed to be legal.

 As has been mentioned numerous times before, by news agencies that are NOT Fox New, this is nothing more than a witch hunt, and yet another attempt by the rabid Right Wing to create a conspiracy out of virtual thin air in as they desperately try hang a scandal around the neck of President Obama, because in their black little hearts they just "know" that one must exist.

By the way I encourage you to read the entire article as it does an incredible job of revealing to what depths these Republican assholes will go to in order to smear this President.

Update: As usual Rachel Maddow has done an exemplary job of explaining this case in very simple  language.  If you want to understand this issue better then click here for further clarification.