We constantly hear from the National Rifle Association that we don’t need more gun laws. We just need to enforce the laws we have. The federal agency primarily responsible for enforcing gun laws is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. So what has the NRA done to help the AFT enforce current gun laws?

In 2004, a Republican congressman and friend of the NRA from Kansas, Todd Tiahrt, added an amendment to a bill regarding the ATF. Until that point, data had been kept on the history of guns used in murders and shootings, which allowed police and policymakers to trace them back to corrupt dealerships and other holes in the system. The rule change written by the NRA and known as the Tiahrt amendment, made this data much harder to acquire. It also forced the justice department to destroy within 24 hours the records of any gun buyer whose background check was approved. The overall impact of the amendment made it much harder for police to clamp down on illegally distributed guns.

Thanks to Wisconsin Republican senator James Sensenbrenner’s provision in the Patriot Act reauthorization in 2006––supported by the NRA––the director of the ATF now has to be confirmed by the senate instead of merely being appointed by the President. The ATF has been without a director ever since. Sensenbrenner was given the NRA’s Defender of Freedom Award that same year.

The NRA has made several attempts to usher through Congress an “ATF reform bill” that would make it much harder – some say virtually impossible – to revoke the gun-selling licenses of crooked dealers. If passed, the ATF would have to prove the dealer’s state of mind, in terms of his or her premeditated intention to break the law.

The NRA backed legislation prohibiting AFT agents from inspecting a firearms dealer more than once a year. They’ve fought against the creation of a federal registry to track gun sales and backed legislation from releasing information from its firearms trace database. The NRA opposes legislation that would close the gun show loophole requiring background checks for all gun sales. They’ve even opposed measures that would allow background checks to block terror suspects from buying guns.

If there were any doubts as to the NRA’s feelings toward the AFT, it can be summed up in the words of its Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. “If I were to select a jack-booted group of fascists who were perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today, I would pick the ATF. They are a shame and a disgrace to our country.”

So much for the NRA’s contention that we just need to, “fully enforce existing federal gun laws.”