Issa to Holder & Co.: "You're liars, and we're about to hold you in contempt."

Legally, as well as morally. Letter here(pdf document). Pretty flatly says "You're stonewalling, you've lied repeatedly, get the documents to us or else." We'll see if it's actually followed through.(found at Sipsey)

More at Examiner here and here, the second on the Democrats' current attempt to say "It's all the responsibility of those idiots in Phoenix. And besides, Bush started it!"


So the University of Chicago Crime Lab is a Joyce foundation-connected 'gun violence' group that had connections to Newell at ATF; incestuous groups, aren't they? Another big borrow from Sipsey here for those who can't go there:

And who is Roseanna Ander?

Why she is Executive Director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, which has nothing to do with forensics or CSI and everything to do with laying the "scientific" predicate for more gun control. From the UCCL website:

Each year around the world, roughly 500,000 people are murdered. Millions more are the victims of other crimes, and billions of dollars worth of property are stolen. Unfortunately, relatively little is known about how best to address this major social problem. For example, a 2005 report from the National Academy of Sciences argued there is surprisingly little good evidence about effective ways to reduce gun violence in America. This is true despite the fact that countless new programs have been launched all over the world the past several decades to try to reduce violence. Yet programs are almost never implemented in a way that facilitates rigorous evaluation; this lack of feedback makes it difficult for policymakers to learn from experience.

The University of Chicago Crime Lab seeks to improve our understanding of how to reduce crime and violence by helping government agencies and non-profit organizations rigorously evaluate new pilot programs. . . . The Crime Lab began in April 2008 in partnership with the City of Chicago, and has been made possible by generous seed funding from the Joyce Foundation, the University of Chicago Office of the Provost, and the School of Social Service Administration through the Center for Health Administration Studies.

Among the Crime Lab’s ongoing projects is the Chicago Initiative to Reduce Gun Violence Among School Age Youth. Our recent "design competition" identified one promising project, out of more than 30 applications, that has the potential to reduce youth gun violence in Chicago.

The UCCL describes her bio thusly:

Prior to joining the Crime Lab, Ander served for 10 years as Program Officer for the Gun Violence program at the Joyce Foundation in Chicago, responsible for the foundation's $3 million in grant-making each year for research and other activities to understand and reduce gun violence. In addition she developed and implemented the Foundation's $6 million, three year Early Childhood Education initiative. Ander spear-headed a number of new Joyce Foundation initiatives to reduce youth gun violence including working with the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) to convene a national summit of law enforcement leaders around gun violence prevention. In addition, she oversaw the Foundation's work to promote the development and implementation of the National Violent Death Reporting System, which is now housed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and being implemented in 17 states. Prior to joining the Joyce Foundation, she served as the Public Health Liaison for Attorney General Scott Harshbarger of Massachusetts. She holds a Master of Science degree in health policy from Harvard School of Public Health.

Ah, yes, the Joyce Foundation. From Wikipedia:

Since 2003, the Joyce Foundation has paid grants totaling over $12 million to gun control organizations. The largest single grantee has been the Violence Policy Center, which received $4,154,970 between 1996 and 2006, and calls for an outright ban on handguns, semi-automatic and other firearms, and substantial restrictions on gun owners. The Joyce Foundation's position on gun control has led to frequent opposition and criticism from gun rights groups, particularly the National Rifle Association, which calls the Joyce Foundation an activist foundation whose "shadowy web of huge donations" leads "straight to puppet strings that control the agenda of gun ban groups".

But the Executive Director of the University of Chicago "Crime Lab" is only one of the hats Ander wears. She was appointed to the Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission by Governor Pat Quinn and just two months after this email exchange she was named to Rahm Emanuel's Chicago mayor transition team's Committee on Public Safety, along with Father Michael *Snuffy" Pfleger, dubbed Snuffy by David Codrea for having infamously called for a Chicago gun store owner to be "snuffed out." Hey, Jake, as David routinely asks, "Whaddaya expect, it's Chi-town."

So Ander is a long-time, highly placed anti-gun zealot, a critical cog in the efforts of the citizen disarmament lobby. Yet ATF senior manager Hayes has apparently more than a passing acquaintance with Ms. Ander. And she, it seems, expects to be queried out of the blue by Hayes. Her reply:

From: Ander, Roseanna

Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 03:25 PM (Eastern)

To: Benjamin.R.Hayes (REDACTED)

Subject: Re: Gun Running Operation Uncovered in Arizona

Are the names in the indictment public? I want to pull up the actual indictments and can't with first and last names.

Roseanna Ander, Executive Director

University of Chicago Crime Lab

55 East Monroe, 30th Floor

Chicago, IL 60603

(LARGE BLOCK REDACTED)

Two minutes later, in a move that bespeaks remarkable inside knowledge of and familiarity with the ATF chain of command, an impatient Ander goes straight to the horse's mouth -- William "Gunwalker Bill" Newell, then ATF SAC of the Phoenix office, responsible for Fast and Furious.

From: Ander, Roseanna (REDACTED)

Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 2:27 PM (Central)

To: Newell, William D.

Subject: Fw: Gun Running Operation Uncovered in Arizona

Do you have this info?

Roseanna Ander, Executive Director

University of Chicago Crime Lab

55 East Monroe, 30th Floor

Chicago, IL 60603

(LARGE BLOCK REDACTED)

Gunwalker Bill responds, and seems to know Ms. Ander quite well also:

From: Newell, William D. (REDACTED)

Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 03:30 PM

To: Ander, Roseanna

Cc: Hayes, Benjamin R. (REDACTED)

Subject: Re: Gun Running Operation Uncovered in Arizona

They were all just posted on the site below. There are several indictments, the main one being the "Avila" one.

http://www.justice.gov/usao/az/index.html

Bill Newell

Special Agent in Charge

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)

Phoenix Field Division (Arizona and New Mexico) (REDACTED)

(LARGE BLOCK REDACTED)

Ms. Anders seems appreciative as well as very knowledgeable about the arc of Gunwalker Bill's career, for she seems to know about his then expected reward of the promotion to to ATF Attache in Mexico City, a job which Newell had long coveted, and which was vacated by the forcing out of Darren Gil, who had objected to being kept out of the loop of Fast and Furious (after the scandal blew up a few days later with Senator Grassley's first letter on the subject, Newell's promotion was first put on hold, and then withdrawn).

From: Ander, Roseanna

To: Newell, William D.

Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 4:38:40 PM

Subject: Re: Gun Running Operation Uncovered in Arizona

Thank you. I guess you are leaving town on a high note!

Roseanna Ander, Executive Director

University of Chicago Crime Lab

55 East Monroe, 30th Floor

Chicago, IL 60603

(LARGE BLOCK REDACTED)

That celebratory high-five prediction would turn out to be premature.

The central point of this email exchange is this. The ATF has always denied that it plays one side of the policy debate or the other, claiming that it is only "enforcing the laws passed by Congress" without bias or favor. Here we see, in the easy familiarity between two high-ranking ATF senior managers and one of the most energetic anti-firearm zealots in the United States, the real truth -- that any pretense of impartiality is just that, a lie. The ATF senior management has a symbiotic relationship with the citizen disarmament lobby and evidently has had for many years. They are, in fact, joined at the hip. More scandalous grist for the upcoming ATF oversight hearing mill, no doubt.

Last, not related to Gunwalker(that we KNOW of...) but very important, Linoge notes the 'National Gun Victims Action Council' letting the cat out:
Any sane gun law will lead to the government being able to take your guns away.
...

But the second italicized line… well, that is the money quote, so to speak. "Any sane gun law will lead to the government being able to take your guns away." The NGVAC seems big on "sane gun laws", with the phrase, along with "insane gun laws" (referring, of course, to anything the big, bad NRA proposes), occurring somewhere around once every two sentences on their webpage – can you say, "SEO-whoring"? I knew you could. But Google-bombing or not, that single sentence, right there, is a seven-inch, ivory-handled KA-BAR shoved between the third and fourth ribs of the dorsal side of "gun control".

Why? Simple: one of the favorite talking points of "gun control" extremists – especially when someone accurately observes that registration leads to confiscation – is that no modern "gun control" organization wants to take your guns away.

ORLY?

Well, then, thank you Elliot and thank you Andrew and thank you to the rest of the National Gun Victims Action Council for providing us such an easy counterpoint to that claim – after all, why would people so viciously obsessed with firearms and the demonization of them want the government to have the ability to take our firearms away if they did not actually want the government to do exactly that?

And look at the phrasing of the sentence – note how they simply say "take your guns"; not "take criminals’ guns", not "take convicted persons’ guns", not "take some people’s guns". Nope, take your guns – as in every single firearm-owning person who happened upon their webpage and happened to read that sentence. Nevermind the "why" of the situation (especially because it boils down to nothing more complicated than their deep-seated, pathological, uncontrollable fear of an inanimate object) – these people want to empower the government to whimsically and capriciously confiscate your private property… ironically, at the point of a gun.