ATF under investigation over Oklahoma raid :: 09/10/2023

Something hinky has been going on in Oklahoma.

A respected member of the community who also has an FFL was raided by the ATF back in July. He’d had several visits by inspectors and thought it was just going to be one more, only he ended up finding out it wasn’t.

Lee Williams has documented much of it over at The Gun Writer on Substack.

Frankly, the whole thing smacks of the ATF’s war on FFLs of all stripes. Nothing appears to have been particularly egregious, at least on the FFL holder’s end, but the bureau’s end was a different matter.

Among other things, there were threats issued, among other things.

And now the county sheriff is looking into the raid.

Oklahoma’s Pushmataha County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the ATF for their recent SWAT raid of one of their county’s most respected residents, Russell Fincher, PCSO Undersheriff Dustin Bray said Tuesday.

No one at the ATF warned the Sheriff’s Office in advance that highly armed federal agents would be conducting the SWAT raid, the Undersheriff said.

“We weren’t apprised of anything,” Bray said. “We are a Second Amendment County, and we are going to protect our citizens here. We are not going to enforce any gun law or rule that violates the constitution.”

Bray did not yet know whether the investigation would yield criminal charges against ATF agents, adding, “That’s a good one for the Attorney General. The thing I’m looking at are more constitutional issues than criminal, such as civil rights violations.”

There are also concerns about how the ATF didn’t follow standard procedures on deconfliction. You see, the bureau should have notified local law enforcement that they were conducting an operation in the town. That way there would be minimal chance of two agencies ending up shooting at one another, neither knowing they’re shooting at other cops.

That’s something worth looking into.

However, when you couple this information with what the FFL at the heart of this case, Russell Fincher, is telling people, what we see is an ATF that’s trying to act like cowboys instead of police.

Fincher didn’t actually break the law, yet they tried to bully him into giving up his license to sell firearms, and are seemingly relishing in the fact that the Biden administration doesn’t actually care about law-abiding citizens.

At most, Fincher is accused of some paperwork errors–no one is disputing the information was correct, it was just apparently transposed in the wrong blocks–and had been cooperative with inspectors, so they send a SWAT team to his house, cuff him in front of his son, and apparently have seized tens of thousands of dollars worth of lawfully obtained firearms.

They’re offering to pay him $10 per gun, by the way. He’d get more at a buyback, for crying out loud.

And then they’re doing it without even notifying the local police that they’re in town? It’s a minor miracle no one got shot.

The truth of the matter is that the ATF has been running wild for far too long. They need to be reined in and reined in hard.

https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2023/09/09/atf-investigation-n74604