Report of BATF
Investigation of Vernon Wayne Howell
Thu Dec 4 03:25:25 2003
64.140.158.57


http://www.carolmoore.net/waco/waco-treasury-appendix-g.html

Report of THE DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY
on the BUREAU OF ALCOHOL, TOBACCO, AND FIREARMS
Investigation of Vernon Wayne Howell
also known as David Koresh September 1993

For the actual report and links to other Appendixes click here.

Appendix G

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FEDERAL FIREARMS ENFORCEMENT

Frederick S. Calhoun, Ph.D., Historian
Federal Law Enforcement Training Center

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) is a relatively young law enforcement organization,
having been created formally in 1972. Yet, measured by the federal laws related to the regulation and taxing of
alcohol, tobacco, and firearms--the laws ATF now enforces--the history of the bureau's duties and responsibilities
stretches across the full two centuries of American history. As early as 1791, revenue acts taxed both alcohol and
tobacco and created the offices of tax inspector, collector, and supervisor. During the next century, the offices
changed names as frequently as the tax rates changed, but the federal interest in raising revenues from alcohol
and tobacco remained strong. Indeed, the formal organization of an independent bureau within the Department
of Treasury specializing in alcohol, tobacco, and firearms law enforcement belatedly recognized the distinct need
for such an agency.
After the Civil War, revenue agents battled moonshiners throughout the South in some of the bloodiest
opposition ever to federal law enforcement. Revenue agents and deputy U.S. marshals by the score were killed as
they roamed the hills and hollows searching out illicit stills. Prohibition changed the government's focus from taxing
whiskey to banning it, yet the revenue agent's job remained as dangerous. After experimenting in social adjustment
a dozen years, Prohibition was rescinded. Spawned by the 1933 repeal of Prohibition, the Alcohol Tax Unit was
established as a tax-collecting branch within the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Continued concern over the violent, organized mobs that plagued the major cities compelled the federal
government to try to curb the gangsters' ability to arm themselves. Rather than ban outright the purchase of
machineguns and sawed-off shotguns--the weapons of choice for the mobsters--Congress in 1934 simply imposed
a tax those weapons. Paying the tax required registering the weapon. The registration requirement was intended
to discourage ownership of such weapons without outlawing them. No self-respecting gangster would want to
register, much less pay the tax, on his Tommygun. Their evasion of the tax gave the government another legal tool
to use in arresting the gangsters and breaking up the mobs.
Because it was a tax rather than a prohibition, it fell to Treasury to enforce the law as part of Treasury's
role in collecting all funds due the government. Within Treasury, the Alcohol Tax Unit seemed the logical branch
to enforce the new law. Registering and taxing stills required many of the same procedures and investigatory
talents that would be needed to register and tax weapons. In the end, the new assignment proved comparatively
easy. The unit was not overwhelmed with registrations nor by the 1940s were the investigations into evasions of
the tax very time-consuming. As the gangsters declined in number and power, so did their use of machineguns and
sawed-off shotguns. Enforcing the alcohol taxes again occupied most of the unit's attention.
In 1951, the Alcohol Tax Unit began enforcing federal taxes on tobacco, thus prompting a name change
in 1952 to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division. Once again, the logic seemed to be that collecting the tax on
tobacco closely resembled the work necessary to collect the tax on alcohol, machineguns, and sawed-off shotguns.
The 1968 passage of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act and the Gun Control Act expanded the IRS
unit's jurisdiction to the criminal use of explosives and bombs. The new laws also defined specific federal offenses
involving firearms, including transportation across state lines and use in organized crimes. In recognition of this
new enforcement responsibility, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division changed its name to the Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms Division (ATFD). Two years later, Congress passed the Explosives Control Act defining certain
bombings and acts of arson as federal crimes. It assigned jurisdiction for enforcing this new law to ATFD.
With these expanded responsibilities, the Treasury Department on July 1, 1972 created the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms under the general oversight of the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for
Enforcement, Tariffs and Trade, and Operations. For the past twenty-one years, ATF has enforced the collection
of federal taxes on alcohol and tobacco and the federal controls and regulations on firearms, with particular
attention to their use by criminals. Although on its face the bureau seems a discordant collection of separate duties,
the techniques for enforcing the taxes and ferreting out the illicit products, whether cases of whiskey, cartons of
cigarettes, crates of automatic weapons, or containers of bombs, are strikingly similar.
Subsequent laws have expanded ATF's jurisdiction. The 1976 Arms Export Control Act focused the
bureau's attention on international gun smuggling. The 1982 Anti-Arson Act gave ATF authority to investigate the
destruction of property by fire as well as by explosives. Increased taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, and enhanced
regulatory measures such as the 1978 Contraband Cigarette Act, have also enhanced the bureau's responsibility
to ensure the government receives its lawful taxes.
The bureau has been an effective force in law enforcement. Supplies of illicit alcohol and smuggled tobacco
have steadily decreased, and tax revenues have risen. During 1991, for example, ATF collected $7.7 billion in alcohol
taxes and $4.8 billion in tobacco taxes. ATF agents have also focused on tracking down armed career criminals and
criminal gang members. Investigations in Florida resulted in the arrest of 45 Warlock motorcycle gang members
in 1991. Members of the Gullymen Posse, a gang of Jamaican drug dealers known for its propensity to commit
murder, were arrested in New York by ATF agents in January 1991. Similarly, an ATF investigation into the
activities of the Born to Kill gang culminated in the arrest of a dozen gang members in August 1991. Sixteen
members of the San Diego chapter of the Hells Angels were convicted in 1992. As a result of these and similar
investigations, ATF has become the nation's principal repository for gang-related information and intelligence. The
bureau has also earned an excellent reputation for working well with federal, state, and local law enforcement
agencies.
ATF agents also specialize in identifying anonymous bombers by their "signature" habits in making bombs.
For example, in 1990, the assassin of Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert Vance was ultimately
identified by ATF agents who recognized the way the bomb was constructed. Similarly, in the midst of the tragedy
in Waco, Texas, ATF agents investigating the World Trade Center bombing helped to identify the van that was
used to hold the bomb. This early identification led FBI agents to the rental car company and thereafter to arrests
of the terrorists before they could escape the country.
The bureau has developed considerable expertise in arson investigations. At the request of the National
Fire Protection Agency, ATF began developing nationwide standards for fire investigators. The State Department's
Diplomatic Security Service invited ATF to develop a protocol
establishing an International Response Team of investigators trained to search blast scenes involving U.S. property
abroad. Despite a rather eclectic array of duties, ATF has succeeded in developing considerable expertise in each
area of its enforcement responsibilities.
The raid by ATF agents on the Branch Davidian compound resulted from its enforcement of
contemporary federal firearms laws. In a larger sense, however, the raid fit within an historic, well-established and
well-defended government interest in prohibiting and breaking up all organized groups that sought to arm or fortify
themselves. The 1934 law taxing weapons was only the first time the federal government addressed private
ownership of weapons; it was not the first federal effort to control firearms. From its earliest formation, the federal
government has actively suppressed any effort by disgruntled or rebellious citizens to coalesce into an armed group,
however small the group, petty its complaint, or grandiose its ambition. The collection of large arsenals by organized
groups lent itself, ultimately, to the violent use of those weapons against the government itself or portions of its
citizenry. Indeed, federal agents who tried to disband the groups frequently became the targets.
The discomfort over armed organizations predated the Constitution. The outbreak of what became known
as Shays' Rebellion in 1786 gave added urgency to the establishment of a strong national government. During the
rebellion, hundreds of angry Massachusetts farmers, most veterans of the Revolution and facing foreclosures on
their farms, banded together to keep the courts from issuing any executions. Calling themselves Regulators, the
farmers quickly organized into a small army. Significantly, their first foray was to capture the arsenal at Spring
field. Although the Regulators failed, the specter survived. Five months, delegates from each of the thirteen states
met in Philadelphia to design a new experiment in government.
The lesson of Shays' Rebellion was not forgotten, even after the new government was formed. In 1792,
Congress passed a law empowering the president to call out the state militias to suppress insurrections if either
an associate justice of the Supreme Court or a local district court judge certified that opposition to the laws was
beyond the powers of the civil authority to suppress. Ironically, the first occasion to resort to that law grew out
of the violent, organized, and armed resistance to the federal government's whiskey tax. Thus, two of the duties
that ATF would later inherent--enforcing alcohol taxes and controlling firearms--combusted in 1794 into the
Whiskey Rebellion, the first violent opposition to the new federal government. (1)
Across the next century, succeeding presidents had sporadic, though no less fearsome, occasion to
dispatch the Army and the state militias to suppress various outbreaks of armed opposition to federal laws, taxes,
and interests. In 1799, Fries Rebellion against a federal tax on houses forced President John Adams to muster the
militia. Fugitive slave rescues during the 1850s prompted the government to call out the military. Organized
resistance in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and Wisconsin raised a troublesome specter. "The main
opposition," President Millard Fillmore warned Congress in December 1851, "is aimed against the Constitution
itself." At the end of the decade, John Brown's ill-fated raid on
Harper's Ferry, Virginia, sparked the government to decisive action. Brown chose Harper's Ferry because of the
federal arsenal there. His intent was to distribute the weapons among Southern slaves and lead them in revolt for
their freedom. Federal troops, however, thwarted the plan.(2)
After the Civil War, the federal government battled unrepentant Southerners to protect the rights of
the freedmen. Nonetheless, federal officials acted only after the innumerable Klan-style attacks were finally
perceived as organized. "Outrages of various descriptions," Attorney General George Williams advised southern U.S.
Attorneys and Marshals in 1874, "and in some cases atrocious murders have been committed in your district by
bodies of armed men, sometimes in disguise and with the view it is believed of overawing and intimidating
peaceable and law abiding citizens and depriving them of the rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution and
laws of the United States." The attorney general ordered his attorneys and marshals "to detect, expose, arrest, and
punish the perpetrators of these crimes.''(3)
Throughout the western territories and along the Mexican border, the federal government found
occasional need to suppress armed bands of outlaws, ganged together to steal cattle or rob the mails. General
William Tecumseh Sherman, sent to the Arizona border in April 1882 to investigate the outlaw troubles there,
advised President Chester A. Arthur that "the
Civil Officers have not sufficient forces to make arrests, to hold prisoners for trial or punish when convicted." The
President promptly proclaimed on May 31 that the areas plagued by the outlaws were in a state of rebellion.(4)
The federal government looked no more kindly on the labor strikes that broke out in the closing years
of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth. What seemed so dangerous about events such
as the 1894 Pullman strike was not just the disruption of the mails, which was the legal basis on which the
government relied to break the strike, but the fact that the mails were being violently disrupted by organized
groups. "We have been brought to the ragged edge of anarchy," Attorney General Richard Olney frantically
explained when he ordered that the trains be kept running. Eventually, Eugene Debs and his colleagues in the
American Railway Union, which took the lead in the strike, were indicted and convicted. Once again, it was the
volatile mixture of violence and organization--combinations determined difficult to suppress--that evoked the full
power of the federal government.(5)
The passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934, the first federal effort to control private ownership
of firearms, grew out of this historic fear of armed organizations. The various collections of gangsters that
proliferated during Prohibition were the true targets of the law, which required a tax and registration on the sale
of their weapons of choice--machineguns
and sawed-off shotguns. Subsequent federal firearms laws have been of a piece. Other than the 1968 ban on
mail-order sales, which was in direct, though delayed, response to the assassination of President Kennedy, federal
gun laws have typically been concerned with the weapons of considerable destructive power generally preferred
by organized groups--bombs, machineguns, and automatic weapons.
In recent times, the federal government has shown itself even less patient with armed groups than it had
historically. Radical extremists of both the Right and the Left have been pursued aggressively once they began
breaking the law. For instance, after the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) launched its self-styled "people's war"
by kidnapping newspaper heiress Patty Hearst and committing a number of daring bankrobberies, the federal
government dedicated its full resources to tracking the group down. Within approximately three months, FBI
agents and Los Angeles police closed in on the group at a house just outside what was then known as Watts.
During an intense gun battle and fire, every member of the SLA in the house was killed.(6)
Gordon Kahl, who stood at the opposite end of the political spectrum from the SLA, met a similar end.
Kahl belonged to the Posse Comitatus which refused to recognize the authority of any government above the
county level. Accordingly, Kahl consistently refused to pay his federal taxes, even after he served time in prison
for not doing so. When U.S. Marshals attempted to arrest him for violating the terms of his probation, Kahl killed
two of them. For the next five months, Kahl hid among his friends and sympathizers until FBI agents located him
in a farmhouse just outside