Armed IRS agents raid gun store, seize buyer information
Twenty heavily armed agents from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) Wednesday raided a gun store in Great Falls, Montana, seizing all buyer information records known as Form 4473s.
The agents reportedly arrived at Highwood Creek Outfitters early Wednesday morning and shut down the store for the day.
“A spokeswoman for the IRS would only say they were there on official IRS business,” reported KMON Radio. “The ATF says it was providing assistance to the IRS. We attempted to enter the store today and were stopped by agents at the door who would only say that the gun store is closed and will reopen tomorrow,” the news outlet added.
Shop owner Tom Van Hoose says he is “known for meticulous adherence to laws and regulations” but has nevertheless been under scrutiny for the last two years from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and now the Internal Revenue Service.
Van Hoose, who sells assault weapons such as AR-15s, believes the scrutiny is politically motivated, according to Truth Press.
Indeed, documents obtained by gun rights organization Gun Owners of America (GOA) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has been working with the FBI to monitor law-abiding Americans for gun purchases without obtaining a warrant.
The general process usually begins with the ATF requesting that the FBI begins tracking a certain citizen's gun purchases. The FBI then places that individual in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which covertly monitors the individual. An analysis by The Epoch Times reveals that the ATF appears to target minorities.
Justifications for these surveillance requests are many times innocuous, such as low-income status. In Arizona, for example, a man who had a reported income of $2,839 was registered in the NICS because he shouldn’t have been able to afford several guns.
“In my experience, someone with this amount of income would not be able to afford 20 firearms,” one ATF agent wrote.
Similarly, a Texas man was subjected to a manual background check because he had no reported work history.
One FBI agent wrote to an ATF liaison that his “targets” were “purchasing an abundance of firearms without a license or known financial means to obtain the product.”
In 2020 a black man in Florida was monitored every day for four months because, as the agent wrote, “Based on my training and experience, I have not seen a legal firearms purchaser purchase approximately 30 firearms in a 120-day window for their personal collection.”
The NICS system is only supposed to be used to prevent those who are prohibited from purchasing firearms from doing so.
Other documents obtained by the GOA show that the federal government forced people to declare themselves incompetent — and therefore prohibited from purchasing a gun — so that they can be registered in the NICS system. The Washington Examiner reports that between 2011 and 2019 the FBI, Secret Service, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement coordinated to force at least 60 people to declare themselves a “danger” to themselves and/or others or “lacking the mental capacity” needed to own a firearm.
The armed participation of the IRS comes as the Biden administration militarizes the agency. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 allocated $80 billion to the IRS, with $45.6 billion earmarked for tax enforcement.
Following the bill’s passage, the IRS began hiring hundreds of armed special agents across all 50 states for its Criminal Investigation unit, the law enforcement branch of the IRS. Major duties listed on the IRS website include the willingness to use “deadly force”.
