The NRA and Republican Party kneecapped the ATF so they could not do their job!

The NRA and some Republicans made the Gun Situation much worse by not allowing the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms ATF to do their jobs.  The NRA stuck a rider in a bill which made it illegal for ATF to ask Gun Shops for information about Guns or people buying the guns.  The Republicans have blocked the pick of ATF for over 6 years, so there has been no agency director.  This is very cynical since they then insist NO NEW GUN LAWS, enforce the laws on the books knowing they have blocked so many laws.  The ATF was almost disbanded but the NRA needed to keep an agency to blame things on and getting Republicans to make laws to cripple enforcement of gun laws.

A bit from the article:  ...made it all but impossible for the government to prosecute corrupt gun dealers. It prohibited the bureau from compiling a national database of retail firearm sales, reduced the penalty for dealers who falsified sales records from a felony to a misdemeanor, and raised the threshold for prosecution for unlicensed dealing.
Perhaps most glaringly, the ATF was explicitly prohibited from conducting more than one inspection of a single dealer in a given year, meaning that once an agent had visited a shop, that dealer was free to flout the law.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/atf-obama-gun-reform-control-alcohol-tobacco-firearms