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The KGB-Style Murder by the ATF
Many of us are probably aware of the outrageous actions of our federal law enforcement agencies against our citizens. There was the raid on the home of Roger Stone in 2021 in the early hours of the morning—it’s worth noting that Stone was an associate of Donald Trump. No one could reasonably explain why the raid of 30 armed men needed to arrive so early. Then there’s the 6:30 am raid of the home of pro-life activist Mark Houck when he was swarmed and arrested by two dozen armed agents; he was accused of pushing a pro-abortion activist at an abortion clinic who was harassing his 12-year-old son. His attorney had suggested that he voluntarily surrender, but the FBI refused. Four months later he was found not guilty.
But it seems that the government is prepared to murder people when events don’t go their way:
In March of this year, Bryan Malinowski, the executive director of the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock, Arkansas, was killed by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) during a pre-dawn raid of his home. It was an unwarranted and indefensible killing of a kind that should never, ever happen in a free country like the United States. Because we have a media that no longer serves in its traditional role as a government watchdog, this incident was not widely reported. Because too many members of Congress no longer take seriously their responsibility to protect the rights of those who elect them, the ATF has suffered no repercussions.
Malinowski was clearly employed full-time, and he sold firearms as a hobby. Federal law permits this activity:
Under federal law, it is perfectly legal to buy and sell firearms as a collector or hobbyist, even without a Federal Firearms License (FFL). An individual doesn’t need to obtain an FFL unless he is ‘engaged in the business’ of selling firearms. Congress has defined ‘engaged in the business’ to apply to those who deal in firearms ‘as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit’ as opposed to those who make ‘occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby.’
In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, the ATF decided he was selling guns as a business, observed him at a gun show, put a GPS tracker on his car, and obtained a search warrant for his home. They never contacted him regarding their perception that he needed to get a Federal Firearms License, when this tragedy could have been averted. Instead, they showed up at his home before dawn:
Dressed in SWAT gear, together with Little Rock police, they showed up in ten vehicles at Malinowski’s house before dawn on March 19. They cut the power to his house and put a piece of tape over the doorbell camera so that Malinowski couldn’t see who they were. Less than a minute later, after an exchange of gunfire, Malinowski was dead. And in violation of both ATF and Little Rock police policies requiring body cameras, not one of the law enforcement agents involved in this deadly raid was wearing an activated camera.
After the killing, Malinowski’s wife was forcibly taken outside in her nightgown in 34-degree weather and was kept outside for over four hours despite multiple requests to see her husband and use the bathroom. In an audio recording from a police vehicle she can be heard sobbing, asking why they killed her husband, and insisting that the agents must have the wrong house because she and her husband are honest, law-abiding people.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent who shot Malinowski in a pre-dawn raid on his West Little Rock home ‘had a reasonable belief that deadly force was necessary to defend himself’ and another agent, Jones said. The ATF has said since March that Malinowski shot at agents first, and Jones’ brief letter confirms that narrative. But it also shows how quickly events moved that morning: About 46 seconds elapsed between the time officers first announced their presence and the moment an agent shot Malinowski in the head.
The government has tried to protect gun owners, but the law was unsatisfactory to the ATF:
The Gun Control Act of 1968 is the main body of law concerning this, and in 1986 this law was amended to allow the ATF to revoke an FFL only for a ‘willful’ violation of the law. The willfulness standard was added ‘to ensure that licenses are not revoked for inadvertent errors or technical mistakes.’ In recent years, however, the ATF has adopted what it calls a ‘Zero Tolerance Policy’ that flies in the face of the willfulness standard—and therefore in the face of laws passed by Congress on behalf of the American people.
Please note that Roger Stone is a Republican political consultant, Mark Hauck was a pro-life activist, and Bryan Malinowski was a gun owner. I’d call these political hit jobs.
* * * *
The attack and murder of Bryan Malinowski is an outrage against not only Mr. Malinowski, but against the American people, and gun owners particularly. The ATF has acted with impunity, violating proper procedure and the law. They had opportunities to avoid the loss of life, but instead they violently threatened Mr. Malinowski in a way that terrified his family. And allowed only 28 seconds to pass after they first pounded on his door, and a total of 46 seconds to elapse before he was killed.
One of Mr. Malinowski’s attorneys ended his article in Imprimis this way:
So how do we regain control over the ATF and other federal law enforcement agencies? It is not going to happen through congressional hearings that provide a forum for political showboating and partisan posturing and that go nowhere. We the American people must demand that Congress, on our behalf, either reassert its authority over these agencies in a way to make it stick or else abolish the agencies and start anew.
If we don’t, Bryan Malinowski will have died in vain and the rest of us, as if we are no longer Americans, will be looking over our shoulders.
Any one of us could be next.
Published in Policing
Infuriating.
Hey ATF. Your assassinations would be a whole lot scarier if you had video showing your hit squad in action.
Why the rush? Were you afraid Malinowski might flush his guns down the john?
The “exchange of gunfire” referred to in the article started when Malinowski fired four shots first from a Colt .45.
Well, I fully agree.
In fact, we have talked about this before. Kedavis and I get dismissed on this sort of thing.
Perhaps, people will pay attention to you.
Maybe they’ll take notice since it’s beyond the pale. When I first read the story, my blood pressure skyrocketed. The details are so egregeious.
Here is the three-page letter from a local prosecutor exonerating the ATF in the shooting.
“No knock” laws need to be…revisited.
And then there is the widespread liberal practice of dehumanizing ordinary conservatives as Nazis.
Difficult to judge events like this where life altering decisions are made in the heat of the moment.
On the other hand, the idea that raids are a better choice than apprehensions in broad daytime when the suspect is going about their day is downright stupid.
This is the same idiotic and fatal logic that led to the Branch Davidian catastrophe.
Malinowski was an upstanding citizen with a clean record and he made a decent living.
So the savagery of his death by agents of a Fed agency is reported on alt media and local sections of the trad media. (As it should be.)
The fact remains that his supposed violation of a gun law could have been handled by a phone call or two rather than by an early morning shooting. (Meanwhile if some bussed-in immigrants had killed him and his wife, they’d be free to get bail and then return back to their homeland.)
But people lower on the food chain get killed all the time by these same Fed agency forces. Even back in the Augthts, Reader’s Digest published an account of a journalist who had done massive amounts of research regarding civilians being shot by SWAT teams and others.
In ten years, 400 people had been killed not because they had done anything wrong but because the agents didn’t check to see if they were at the right address. Imagine being an elderly woman who hears a swarm of people entering her house – in the same type of attire worn by local gang members. You grab your rifle to protect yourself, come down your stairway, see numerous gang members clustered about so you raise your rifle. Immediately you are shot by the SWAT team numerous times. Why? Because they couldn’t be bothered to see if they were at the right household.
That would eliminate the intimidating power play by the mobs brown shirts . What’s the fun in that ?
sarc/off
@bryangstephens
@kedavis
This entire attitude is condoned by those in power.Meanwhile in some regions, these people are in league with the drug traffickers, and sex traffickers who are such a scourge on our society. In Calif, I suspect the situation goes clear up to the governor’s office. (Citizens should not have guns, but authorities look the other way when drug cartels take over property in remote areas, and do illegal grows. The cartel people are allowed guns! Often the people they hire to maintain the illegal grows are killed once their employment is no longer needed.)
Of course, if this deadly official attitude was not condoned, we wouldn’t have any of the entertainment provided by Bryan S’s and kedavis’ numerous posts on “our” police abusing their powers and harassing, injuring and killing innocent civilians.
Does anyone care that this upstanding citizen who could have been subdued with a phone call initially fired four shots that led to his death?
You’re right – that’s exactly the point.
If the ATF had called him a month before and said,
If they had done that, this whole situation could have been avoided.
But they didn’t do that.
And that’s the whole point.
If someone covered my doorbell camera , cut the power, and didn’t clearly identify themselves first, not really.
It’s all beyond the pale, really. Has been for a long time, even before many people began to take notice.
There are more examples at The Civil Rights Lawyer channel on YouTube and elsewhere, some of which are included in
https://ricochet.com/1709890/arrest-for-failure-to-show-id
where, in addition to the OP example which is bad enough, the kid in the video in comment #66 could easily have wound up dead because the cop was enforcing his ego rather than the law.
One way to avoid that is to not create situations resulting in heat-of-the-moment life-altering decisions.
And Ruby Ridge and so much more.
@hoyacon I’m surprised at your question. We can’t know why a dead man fired four shots. Do we know why ATF didn’t use a more appropriate approach to the arrest? Other federal law enforcement agencies do this as well.
@susanquinn How many firearms do you have to buy and sell per year before a “hobby” becomes a business?
I ask because the local paper reports this:
I know a lot of collectors. One of each is the norm. But 34 Glocks?
The Democrat-Gazette also reports that Malinowski had a reputation around town as the man you went to when you couldn’t legally purchase a gun.
There are other things that simply don’t add up. Malinowski’s wife told police her husband kept his guns in a safe. Are we to believe that Malinowski woke up, retrieved a firearm from a locked safe, and managed to squeeze off four shots (one of which wounded an ATF agent) in the timeline provided by the attorney?
Good job avoiding the pertinent question regarding approach to making an arrest. It has little to do with the alleged criminal activity. Why would they approach the arrest in such a provoking manner? Only a couple of answers to this and one is they are hoping for a shoot-out.
Why would you ask Susan how many sales are too many? Ask the ATF.
I own 11 different 1911 handguns. I carry three of them frequently. That’s a lot more than one of each. I have 5 AR’s. Is that too many for you?
So the local paper reports rumors about the guy. Is that supposed to be dispositive?
In one of our outbuildings there is a handgun safe that takes about three seconds to open, on a nightstand next to a bed. So yes, a gun stored in a safe can be ready to fire very, very quickly.
No, I don’t care. If you read the entire description of events, he probably had no idea who was breaking into his home. What would you do? Ask them who they are first?
Thank you, Dr. Bastiat.
We don’t have a gun safe, but if we did, we’d probably have one gun within reach. Wanna bet the Democrat-Gazette is a left publication against guns? I appreciate your trying to shine more light on the situation, EJ, but I’m not sure you have.
‘Shock and awe’ is no way to treat an American in his own home.
Imagine waking up to shouting people and flashlights while you are in bed with the person you love most in the world.
These warrants and tactics need to be curtailed or removed and the people who participate in them or greenlight them need to face legal consequences. Until that happens, the federal government will continue to operate in ways that run counter to the Constitution.
Gee, why would you approach in such a manner if you knew the guy was armed to the hilt?
Because it’s her post and she’s quoting his attorney as stating he wasn’t in it for the profit. But she makes no indication whatsoever that she knew exactly how many firearms he was moving and how little time elapsed between purchases and resales and who was buying.
What you do as a responsible gun owner is of very little interest to me or anyone else. If you’re making straw purchases or selling to someone you don’t know on a regular basis then let’s talk.
I only have one 9mm myself but I store guns and ammunition for my sons when they are at school or on prolonged business trips. So save me the lectures and the artificial manhood measurements.
If a local reporter hears that stuff about someone in the community what do you think the cops were hearing? Did you read the affidavit that prompted the approval of the search warrant?
Malinowski had been under investigation for over two months. Guns he sold ended up, not only in California, but in Canada. He sold four guns to ATF agents and told them if they needed more where he could be reached the following weekend.
Susan also implied that this was a political killing. Malinowski has no record of huge political contributions at the federal level and there is no indication that he held his job through political largesse.
But he was a gun owner–and we all know that only the feds should own guns.
The quotes came from the paper but the information is contained in a 300+ page report from the Arkansas State Police. Unless you’re insinuating that Gov. Sarah Huckabee is in on this web of corruption the editorial views of the paper are immaterial.
Did I interrupt the narrative with inconvenient facts? Can’t say I’m sorry. Life is messy and often impervious to painting it with clean lines of black and white. Journalism 101: Never accept a single-source as “the truth.”
Okay, EJ. Why don’t you share why you think the ATF took this route without contacting him first. Even by mail.
Very good question.
He works at the airport. Approach him there. With two unassuming cops, in plainclothes. The cops should be polite and respectful.
If they suspected that he might be armed, then don’t sent a SWAT team in the dark.
Unless they wanted him dead, rather than arrested.
You’re guilty of your own recommendation accepting single sources. Also, I doubt Gov. Huckabee participated in the report writing, so I’m not holding her accountable. The information from the newspaper said “he had a reputation”; boy that’s reassuring. Unless the police report investigated all their allegations, I’d question them.
You still haven’t responded to my question about the ATF not contacting him about their concerns.
No body cam, no job. No mandatory body cams conveys an intent to evade the law. And in instances involving a civilian death, no right of appeal, no pension. Fire them for cause. Then remand the case for investigation. And, obviously, require these agents to stand naked in the street in 30-degree weather for a minimum of 12 hours and post the video on Rumble.
This was something, but it certainly wasn’t law enforcement. FJB.