The FBI hasn’t been at the top of anyone’s list of favorite law enforcement agencies for a while. They kind of earned that over the last handful of years, if not for decades before that. However, this week is particularly special for the bureau.
Thankfully, no agents were killed, so it’s not like as bad a week as when the Miami shootout happened, but it still isn’t great. It started with us learning about them stealth editing the violent crime data, then continued with a former agent being arrested for “ghost guns” and illegal suppressors. If nothing else happened, that would have been enough.
But then we found out that parts from supposedly destroyed guns from the FBI–and the DEA, to be fair–ended up in so-called ghost guns.
The FBI and DEA have been slammed in a new audit that said insiders stole gun parts slated for “destruction” that later ended up in a “ghost gun” seized during a criminal case.
Both agencies were accused of poorly securing critical pistol parts that could easily be taken by anyone inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Agency training academy at Quantico, Va. in recent years.
“We concluded that inadequate policies regarding the destruction of employee issued firearms create significant risks that firearms or their parts could be lost or stolen and used in subsequent crimes without accountability,” said the advisory memo from Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz to FBI Director Christopher Wray and DEA Administrator Anne Milgram.
The issue was discovered last year when an unidentified suspect was arrested with a “ghost gun,” which is typically made from kits that in the past didn’t require a background check or registration.
While it investigated the case, the DEA realized that the barrel and slide came from a DEA gun that was to be destroyed in 2019. “According to DEA records, the slide and barrel were part of a DEA employee issued firearm that had been destroyed over three years earlier,” said the memorandum.
It seems these parts were just stored in a barrel. The barrel was for guns that were meant to be destroyed, which wouldn’t be an issue except that the “gun cleaning room” at Quantico was wide open. It shared a building with the cafeteria and apparently, no one bothered to add additional security to the part of the building where firearms and firearm parts were stored.
Basically, anyone who had access to Quantico in general had access to this particular room.
This meant that both DEA and FBI firearm parts meant to be destroyed could be just picked up out of the barrel and there was no way for anyone to realize it.
And what do you want to bet a significant number of the folks involved in this decision support mandatory storage laws for you and me? What do you want to bet that a lot of them want to regulate parts for homemade, unserialized firearms, essentially putting the practice out of business? And all because we can’t be trusted with guns or something.
That’s rich.
Anyway, this is just a bad week for the FBI overall. On every front, the nation’s supposedly premier law enforcement agency has dropped the ball, screwed the pooch, or otherwise done anything but cover themselves in glory, but the problems at the bureau go back quite a bit, including when high-ranking agents vowed to undermine President Trump.
We’re past the point where we should probably burn the whole thing to the ground and rebuild it from scratch. The only problem is that I don’t trust anyone in power to actually do it right.
