[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 11230]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          UNDERMINING THE ATF

  (Mr. QUIGLEY asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute.)
  Mr. QUIGLEY. Mark Twain is credited with quipping: ``Denial ain't 
just a river in Egypt.'' If he were around today, he might add: It also 
passes for gun policy in the U.S. Congress.
  The ATF is under fast and furious fire right now, and rightly so. 
Allowing hundreds of guns to ``walk'' in the hopes of catching big fish 
traffickers was terribly ill advised. But so too is Congress's excuse 
for gun policy. And sorry, folks, but the two are not entirely 
unrelated. If Congress wants to crack down on straw purchasing and stop 
the trafficking of firearms to Mexico, it is operating from the mother 
of all playbooks of how you would not accomplish it:
  Chapter 1, ensure that the ATF remains devoid of leadership; Chapter 
2, pass only perfunctory straw purchasing laws; Chapter 3, attempt to 
block a simple commonsense proposal that border State dealers report 
multiple sales of AK-47s; Chapter 4, author legislation to immunize 
corrupt gun dealers and call it the ATF Modernization Act.
  It's true: ``Denial River'' in Congress runs vast, wide, and deep.

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