The long war on guns.

• Author: Krayewski, Ed
• Position: Follow-Up - Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives

"In a paramilitary-style operation, government agents invaded the neighborhood of Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Tungren," the vignette reads. "A four-block area was sealed off, the neighborhood evacuated, and the Tungren home surrounded. Some of the agents ransacked their home, while others stood over the Tungrens with automatic rifles."

As John D. Lewis Jr. wrote in "American Gestapo," the cover story of reason's April 1980 issue, the couple was wrongly thought to have violated Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) regulations at a time--1978--when the agency was trying to transition from targeting bootleggers to enforcing gun control laws. The ATF's toolbox included entrapment, unsavory informants, and vague regulations, all tactics familiar among the numerous armed agencies operating in the United States today.

In 1993, an ATF'siege of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas, ended with a fire that killed all 76 people inside, a low point for the bureau that nevertheless didn't lead to any significant reconsideration of its powers. Lewis wrote of ATF's in the 1970s setting up stings involving fake "prohibited persons" and "straw runners." More recently, in this decade, the ATF found itself again embroiled in controversy over a botched operation, known as "Fast and Furious," in...