The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) does not have the best reputation vis-à-vis guns, and a new internal audit finds the agency has a record of carelessness with its own weapons.
Though the ATF does not lose guns at the rate it once did, it had "26 instances of lost, stolen, or missing firearms" in the fiscal years 2014 to 2017, and at least one of those weapons is known to have been used in commission of a crime. Some of these guns were lost in diners or on the Washington Metro system. One was discovered by an agent's neighbor, who found it sitting on the roof of the agent's car.
Perhaps more troubling given the sheer scale of the problem is ATF's missing ammunition. The report found "several significant deficiencies related to tracking and inventory of ammunition. For example, ammunition tracking records were understated by almost 31,000 rounds at the 13 sites we audited." Extrapolated across the agency's 275 offices, that comes out to about 650,000 missing rounds. Explosives were also not correctly inventoried in some offices and may be lost or stolen as well.
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Audits of other federal agencies have shown ATF is not alone in losing track of deadly weapons. The Department of Homeland Security and the Bureau of Prisons, among others, have evinced a similar sloppiness.
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