JOE Biden has been told to forget about trying to ban homemade ghost guns and concentrate on punishing criminals for wreaking havoc on the streets.
In a wide-ranging interview with The U.S. Sun, former federal agent Peter Forcelli, who was a whistleblower in Barack Obama's botched attempt to stop firearms falling into the hands of Mexican cartels, thinks Biden is barking up the wrong tree.
Biden's attempt to combat ghost guns was heard by the US Supreme Court for the first time in April, with the next hearing slated to take place in October.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives wanted to push through regulations for serial numbers and background checks to come into play for buyers.
It was met with stiff resistance from various owners, the Firearms Policy Coalition, and Second Amendment Foundation.
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FIREARM FURY
The Biden administration claims "an explosion of crimes involving ghost guns" has resulted in tens of thousands of the firearms being seized.
Yet the ATF was accused of exceeding its authority under the Gun Control Act, with the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals decreeing they attempted to "take on the mantle of Congress to 'do something' with respect to gun control. But it is not the province of an executive agency to write laws for our nation."
Pro gun groups, meanwhile, argued the policy was a threat to legal ownership.
Forcelli, a 9/11 survivor and former ATF deputy assistant director, is adamant going after ghost guns is a waste of time.
He feels sympathy for families who have been affected - a 12-year-old in San Diego was killed in 2021 after shooting himself with one at a sleepover is one of the most harrowing of examples - but, Forcelli stresses the problems are far deeper than just trying halt sales.
“Everything that they're doing seems to be attacking the gun industry and legitimate gun owners and distracting them from the mission that I believe in, which was to go after the people who were using guns to rob others, to hurt others, to do home invasions,” he told The U.S. Sun.
ZERO TOLERANCE
He believes demonizing the gun is wrong and that if a "legitimate law abiding citizen has a gun, it's a very different thing than somebody who's involved in criminal activity having a gun."
"The Biden administration have taken this zero tolerance stance with the gun industry where like licensed dealers selling guns into legitimate commerce, making honest mistakes on a form, putting them out of business," he said.
"With 3D printing, people are just going to keep making them. You want to go after the problem, but I think they're misidentifying the problem. The problem is the people, not the item."
Forcelli is at pains to point out that when working as a homicide detective in New York City, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, there were still 600 murders a year.
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"The reality is, there are evil people among us," he said.
Operation Trigger Law was raised in 1997, which would see defendants plead guilty to attempted possession of a gun. Yet it wasn't working.
NIGHTMARE WORSENED
Forcelli believes the same criminals who were arrested with a gun would be "out tomorrow trying to kill or shoot somebody."
In response, his team worked more on federal prosecutions, with felons charged upwards of four years for possession of firearms.
The homicide rates dropped from 600 to 200 - "not great but at least 400 extra people a year got to live" - and by bringing increasing numbers of criminals in, the cops could infiltrate the source of unsolved robberies and murders.
"If these folk wanted to get reduced sentences, they had to put everything on the table," Forcelli added.
"I had one case where we went after a defendant whose name kept coming up and up and again.
"So we charged him with possession of a firearm. He was looking at a lot of time. He came in and the end result of that case was a network of 23 people involved in 145 home invasion robberies, six murders."
The now retired former cop and federal agent wants the authorities to focus on investigations and traditional police work to unearth the criminals.
"I hate to say it, but blaming the gun is a lazy person's way out," he said.
STATE CONFUSION
He believes the people who sell ghost guns to kids, for example, should "absolutely be found" and agrees it's "tragic."
Yet, says Forcelli, under US law, people are permitted to make a gun and not place a serial number on them.
"If I decide to sell the gun, and it's just me selling a personally owned gun to you, and you live in the same state that I live in, and it's not banned by the state law, then I can sell it right now."
The problems occur, however, with laws varying from between states, and officials not realizing which ones pertain to the cases they are dealing with.
Forcelli admits the gun laws in the US are a mess - and his involvement in an attempt to curb the increasing power of Mexican drug cartels ended in recriminations, ugly court battles, and the murder of a valued colleague.
"The guns flowing to Mexico out of Arizona were mind blowing," he recalled with a shudder. "We would do a car stop where you'd have 30 AK-47 knockoffs in the back of a car."
STING OPERATIONS
Between 2006 and 2011, the ATF carried out a number of sting operations, which allowed illegal straw buyers to sell firearms equipped with GPS systems over the border in the hope they would then be used and reclaimed at crime scenes.
It didn't work. By October 2011, none of the primary targets had been arrested.
The GPS batteries would only last for a few days or get lost in transit.
During the largest sting - Operation Fast and Furious - ATF agents from a team in Phoenix tracked around 2,000 guns, and although 710 were recovered a year later, the top men remained on the streets.
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Peter Forcelli
He says only 10% of the cases were being prosecuted, and "the ATF were being trusted to stop the guns. But the ATF wasn't stopping them."
Federal prosecutors, according to Forcelli, in Arizona were washing their hands of gun crimes once they crossed over into Mexico.
"We didn't know this at the time in my group, but they were letting them ride off into the sunset," he said with a sigh.
FATAL SHOOTOUT
Things took a serious turn for the worse in December 2010 following the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, who was shot and killed in a gun fight.
The bullet which killed Terry was too badly damaged to be linked to the ATF guns, but the rifles were traced within hours of the shooting to a gun shop linked to Fast and Furious.
But members of the Obama administration - Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler and Deputy Chief of Staff Monty Wilkinson - didn't think the developments were significant enough to alert those at the very top.
ATF agent John Dodson was furious and wanted the truth to be known.
"The agent was killed and now all of a sudden they had blood on their hands," said New Yorker Forcelli.
"If John Dodson didn't step forward, I don't know that Congress would have ever found out that Brian was killed with a gun the ATF knew about.
"So that's when I came forward and blew the whistle."
TIME TO ACT
Forcelli had seen enough. He was furious at a string of failed prosecutions, including a member of the influential Sinaloa cartel who was caught crossing the border with disassembled grenades in his tires.
"They wouldn't prosecute him either, which was mind blowing," he said with incredulity.
In the meantime, a diplomatic nightmare began to brew - the Mexican Attorney General revealed a number of the tracked guns were found at scenes where over 150 locals were killed or injured.
As the dispute over the release of the Justice Department documents raged, Attorney General Eric Holder became the first sitting member of the United States cabinet to be held in contempt of Congress.
Holder was accused of ordering Obama to invoke executive privilege to keep the details of the troubled stings private.
But four years later, Obama was forced to turn over thousands of pages of records, and Forcelli was in a battle to clear his name.
He testified in front of Congress fighting for his reputation, but was determined to ensure the truth was revealed.
He fought his corner, was able to continue his career, and has released a book about his ordeal - The Deadly Path: How Operation Fast & Furious and Bad Lawyers Armed Mexican Cartels - which he hopes brings some light to a dark situation.
Forcelli has since recovered from lung cancer, caused by his time heroically attempting to save victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack, yet fears the gun problems in the United States - and Mexico - will continue unless the people in charge redirect their efforts in rooting out the criminals in a more effective way.
"The sad part is the bodies are still showing up on the other side, next to Fast and Furious guns," Forcelli concluded.
"I wrote the book for two reasons. One was to tell the Terry family, at least give them some answers. But two was so that ATF agents and cops working in other parts of the country and see what happened and learn from it so that God willing it never happens again.
"We could have had an impact, but we weren't allowed to. The fact that they thumped their nose at so many, just solid cases to me was, was just malfeasance.
"There's no other way to describe it."
