This from the NRA

As we reported last month, a coalition of congressional representatives led by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer  (R-Mo.) had requested internal investigators at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to conduct formal inquiries into Operation Choke Point, as well as any officials and staff involved in the program.  Rep. Luetkemeyer is now reporting that those requests have been granted.  According to his press release announcing the decisions, “The correspondence I received from the FDIC and DOJ is a great first step in ensuring that those responsible for Operation Choke Point are held accountable and that Congress and the American people receive details and answers they deserve.” Over the past year, we have reported at length on the abuses of Operation Choke Point, an enforcement program involving DOJ and FDIC (among other agencies) that claims to target financial fraud, but in reality is being used to choke off banking services to legitimate, although politically-disfavored, businesses.  These businesses include retailers of firearms and ammunition, a number of which have found their banking relationships abruptly severed with little or no explanation and without reference to anything the individual businesses did or did not do.  Earlier this year, a congressional report based on examination of nearly 900 internal DOJ documents found that the operation’s adverse effect on legitimate businesses was not merely an unintended side-effect but the outcome of a deliberate attempt to target entire business sectors that, while legal, were deemed objectionable by regulators. Many questions about the program remain, including who decided which business sectors should be targeted, the extent of coordination between the agencies involved, and who within the Obama administration knew of or encouraged the activity.  The forthcoming investigations should hopefully shed light on these and other important issues.  What is clear is that DOJ and FDIC have a lot of explaining to do. Read more

BELLEVUE, WA – The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today said the announcement by Buffalo, N.Y. police that they will begin confiscating guns registered to recently deceased citizens “is not simply cold-hearted, it is ghoulish.”

CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said a report on Fox News affirmed something that gun rights advocates have contended for years: “Gun registration leads to confiscation.”

“The idea that police would peruse the obituaries and compare the names of recently deceased persons with their pistol permit records, and then send officers to take those guns while a family is still grieving their loss is simply unconscionable,” Gottlieb said. “This is tantamount to dancing on someone’s grave and it amounts to taking property without due process or probable cause.”

At a press conference several days ago, Buffalo Police Commissioner Daniel Derrenda announced that his agency will dispatch officers to “collect guns that belong to pistol permit holders who had died so they don’t end up in the wrong hands,” Fox News reported. Under the law, when a permit holder passes, his or her estate has only 15 days to either dispose of the firearms or surrender them to authorities, who may hold onto them for as long as two years.

“This is the kind of behavior one might expect in a police state, but not the United States,” Gottlieb observed. “But it proves that the anti-gun mindset knows no boundaries. From now on, no gun control zealot will be able to dismiss and ridicule the concerns of law-abiding firearms owners that there is no reason to fear gun registration, no matter what form it takes. This explains why gun owners are opposed to registration and other forms of record-keeping and permit laws.

“What’s worse,” he added, “is that this effort could forever drive a wedge between police and honest citizens whose only crime is that they exercised their Second Amendment rights.

“The final insult,” Gottlieb concluded, “is that 16 days after someone dies, his or her survivors could become criminals simply because they didn’t report a firearm, or maybe didn’t even know it existed. This is the most disgusting and disrespectful thing that someone could do to people who have just suffered the heartbreaking loss of a loved one. Derrenda should be ashamed.”

Nothing new here for the elite among us.  It’s do as I say and that’s that!  Details here…