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The strategy is working. ATF agents often quote a maxim: "Big cases, big problems; no cases, no problems." The intense and well-orchestrated opposition has succeeded in discouraging ATF from aggressively pursuing investigations of gun shows, flea markets and licensed gun dealers, even though these often prove to be major conduits for the diversion of guns to criminals. The bureau's reluctance to investigate dealers has long driven agents to jokingly describe a dealer's license as "the $10 immunity." (Until two years ago, the annual licensing fee was $10.) A series of standing ATF orders closely choreographs all such investigations and requires that they be monitored from ATF headquarters in Washington. "You have to jump through six hoops of fire," says Kubicki, the agents' association counsel. Says Phil McGuire, a former ATF deputy director: "There's no question the N.R.A. has dictated exactly [the rules for] such things as dealer investigations and investigations of gun shows."
FAR FROM CRACKING DOWN, ATF allowed the number of licensed gun dealers to swell to nearly 300,000 by 1993. Often it failed to conduct thorough background checks for prior criminal offenses. In a survey it found that 72% of its licensed dealers never even bothered to open a bona fide store, but operated instead from their homes. Under Magaw, however, the bureau has lately got much tougher on applicants, requiring for the first time that they submit fingerprints and a photograph. Now the number of dealers is falling at a rate of 150 dealers a day, an ATF spokesman says, and the bureau expects the total to level off at somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000.
The persistent barrage of outside attack also helped create a culture in which senior managers and agents face each other across a vast reservoir of distrust and hostility, according to hundreds of pages of internal reports and court documents reviewed by Time. Rank-and-file agents have long protested how managers use ATF's internal-affairs unit, which routinely conducts three to five times as many internal probes as the Secret Service's apparatus, even though each agency has roughly 4,000 employees. Magaw explains the differential as partly because of the fact that ATF agents conduct far more gritty street investigations and thus are likely to draw more flak inside and outside the agency. But Magaw also sees the difference as the result of ATF's failure to train its agents adequately and of the unsettling effect of so much outside criticism.