In a legal battle with gun owners, Justice Department lawyers described a new gun sale rule as a necessary and effective foreign policy measure.
Lawyers from the DOJ said in a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday that the two month old regulation on gun merchants in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas is necessary to prevent guns from being sold to Mexican drug cartels, according to the Associated Press.
The regulation — which forces gun merchants to give the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives information about customers who buy two or more semi-automatic rifles greater than .22 caliber within five days — gives ATF agents the ability to monitor gun sales more quickly, Justice Department attorney Daniel Reiss, said.
Reiss added that federal agents have already launched two investigations since the new regulations have been implemented.
But Stephen Halbrook, an attorney for Arizona based gun store J & G Sales and Foothills Firearms, said that the rule, which requires gun store owners to obtain the birth dates, addresses, race and gender of purchasers of multiple higher caliber semi automatics, amounts to an invasion of privacy. He said that the previous rules only demanded the turning over of such information to federal authorities in the event of a criminal investigation.
“We don’t deny the fact there is a serious problem and it needs to be dealt with,” Halbrook said, but argued that the problem should be dealt with differently, and characterized the new rules as “just a fishing expedition”.
The new requirement was imposed in the wake of Operation Fast and Furious, a botched gun operation that allowed guns to be “walked” into Mexico. Two guns from the operation were recovered in December at the scene of a shootout between Border Patrol agents and Mexican bandits near Rio Rico, Ariz., that resulted in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry. Other guns sold during the operation have been linked to violent crime scenes in Mexico.
James Vogts, an attorney for another gun store suing the ATF, argued that the requirement, which applies to 8,500 dealers, was inspired by the fallout over Operation Fast and Furious.
“I think the decision was hastily made, perhaps for political reasons,” he said.
But Reiss told U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer that the number of American firearms in Mexico is far greater than the number alleged to have been lost by the ATF during Operation Fast and Furious.
