Let's play "lose the weapon"

The FBI has improved mightily recently in its accounting of laptop computers, some containing sensitive and classified information, and firearms under its control. From February 2002 to September 2005, the agency lost or allowed to be stolen 160 laptops, as well as 160 weapons. As bad as this sounds, this is actually a major IMPROVEMENT from the last audit period, ending in 2002, in which 354 weapons and 317 computers were reported lost or stolen.

From the article:

"Although the scale of the FBI's losses have improved, the new report said, investigators were still troubled by the numbers of missing items and the haphazard recordkeeping surrounding them. The report said that in some cases FBI officials did not attempt to assess the potential damage to national security when a laptop containing classified information was lost."

Nothing like investigating yourself with the same zeal that you use to investigate others, huh? Why aren't the agents involved under the same scrutiny as a gun dealer that had poor record keeping and continually "lost" firearms? Why don't they get treated like Wen Ho Lee, who was jailed for months when he was accused of stealing or losing classified information from the Los Alamos Laboratory?

"The FBI maintains more than 52,000 weapons and 26,000 laptops, the report said."

Yeah, that's a lot to keep track of, but this is supposed to be the "best" law enforcement agency we have, staffed by college educated and highly trained, "professional" employees, and backed by all of the resources of the Federal Government. Remember, Tom Daschle was the one who said "You can't professionalize until you Federalize". I can't think of any private business that would allow this level of loss of tools, particularly deadly ones, and loss or theft of sensitive and classified information.

Compare this to the law-abiding gun dealers in several Southern states that were targeted by Mayor Michael "I Am My Own Law" Bloomberg, who conducted an illegal sting operation that attempted to entrap the dealers into allowing straw purchases. The dealers, which were recently cleared of wrongdoing by the ATF, are now petitioning the Feds to criminally charge Bloomberg with directing private investigators to make the straw purchases, which, since it wasn't a law enforcement operation, is itself a Federal crime. Can you imagine the hounds of hell that would have descended on these dealers if they had been missing even one weapon? You can bet that their businesses would have been shuttered, and they would have been jailed immediately, as an example to all of the other gun dealers in the country.

"The 2002 report found nearly 1,000 missing firearms in Justice agencies, including at least 18 weapons later recovered by local police departments in connection with criminal investigations. Several were used in armed robberies and one was found in the pocket of a murder victim, according to the previous audit."

I think that Mr. Bloomberg is looking in the wrong place for his "flow of illegal weapons".