Government plan at gun show?

Status
Not open for further replies.
P

pinkerpv

New member
I was at a gun show in Birmingham, AL today and among the vendors was a guy selling baseball type hats with the various military logos, etc. I was standing near his two tables and he approached me and handed me a small American flag sticky, and then initiated conversation. He asked me if I was in the service or retired to which I responded yes, retired, and we began a conversation centered on military rank, experience, and duty stations as is usual when military people meet and talk. It eventually turned to Obama and the state of the country and then he asked me if I was ready to fight back. The UN soldiers on US soil was mentioned. I kinda nodded and acknowledged what he was saying but also mentioned that was something difficult to do and we began talking about other things. He mentioned Homeland Security and the large amount of ammunition purchased. None of these things are unusual for discussion at gun shows. He eventually mentioned he was with some veterans organization and was selling hats to support them. He didn't appear to have any literature on the tables. Just hats. I bought one hat and moved on. The whole time I was talking to him there seemed something odd about the situation.
After I got home and was watching the playoffs and dozing off, my subconscious mind began working I guess and I began to wonder if he was a plant by one of the government organization like BATF, NSA or Home Land Security. Now before you start calling me a nut case, I have seen and talked to BATF agents at gun shows who were very open about their business and even had a booth. And i have heard about BATF agents running stings at shows. The thing that really got me going was when he began talking about Obama and the UN troops and fighting back.
Anyone had any experience with this type of thing at other gun shows. With the NSA spying and Department of Home Land Security concerns about home grown terrorists and especially their definition including retired military, Christians, and gun rights activists, I am concerned.

I know this sounds a paranoid but humor me a little.
 
Sure, I'll humor you, a bit. Look up the term agent provocateur...its a tactic that has been in use for a long time, not always in the best legal fashion.

when you see on the news some idiot getting put away because he tried to be a jihadist bomber, and got his "bomb" from undercover agents (FBI, etc)?

How do you think they catch these guys? They chat them up, get friendly, see where they want, and will go, and if its over the line, they build a case and bust them.

Open agents and officers are only one part of law enforcement. You may have met a good, honest citizen who's manner of expressing concern about the world mislead you. You may have met a real member of the lunatic fringe. Or you may have met a member of law enforcement pretending to be a lunatic fringe. And, if you did, you suspecting he was an undercover agent means he wasn't very good at it.;)
 
Given what you described (and the state you reside ;)), I wouldn't think anything of it.
Normal small talk for those who still remember when this was a free country. :cool:
 
I can tell you that none of the things he said are the least bit uncommon in the gun culture these days. I think it's a bit of a stretch to think he's a government plant of some sort.
 
A broken clock....

There's a old saying about how even a broken clock is right 2 times a day, :D .

You might be taking the remarks a bit off. I highly doubt a federal agency like ATF or the US Secret Service or the FBI is going around spying on gun show vendors or asking about ball caps. :rolleyes:
The FBI Academy had to shut down due to the lack of funding. There's a book that came out around 4/5 years ago documenting all the problems & mismanagement at the agency. The FBI had offices computers so old, they couldn't even donate them to charities. :eek:
As for the ATF(which also has major problems with fraud & abuse), they'd need to be doing a criminal investigation related to a case to be so inclined to chat up a gun show customer or vendor. I spoke at length to a senior ATF special agent in NE Florida last summer. He said the ATF & other agencies like DHS, CBP, USMS, Park Rangers, etc do not care about ammunition, concealed carry license holders, reloaders, etc.
He told me their hands are full with drug gangs, terrorists, fugitives, illegals.
People like to feel special or "in the loop". :cool:
If you think wearing a T-shirt or ball-cap will make you the FBI's most wanted, I highly doubt it.
 
Its possible he was a plant at some level. I don't think a lot of posters regard the ".GOV" as a single, unified organization, which IMO is far from accurate. There are many levels & division & sub-divisions of "Government" & its quite likely he may have worked for some part of the overall "Government organization" but that doesn't mean he had to be a part of "FedGov" or anything like it.

I've run into a few plants at gun shows in different places so yes they do happen, but sometimes its something like the BATF (Before they got the "E" added) as I've definitely called one out on one occasion where he was "Door Sharking" a fully automatic rifle with the old *nudge, nudge, wink* wink* being horribly obvious. I've seen an "unmarked" table where illegal parts were being offered & there were video cameras hidden to document anyone daft enough to buy them.

I've seen picture phones used to grab pics of people entering a show & then sent in to a second person inside who'd follow the "suspected patron" to see if they did anything "wrong". In some cases the operation was being run by local or state police & one was even just someone in authority trying to make a quick hit for personal advancement.

Because of all the varying levels at which some kind of sting can be mounted I don't get all paranoid about it, but I do "proceed with caution" if my "Spidey sense" tingles.:cool:
 
Interesting post!

I've been going to GS's for 30yrs, way before 911. There were always tables selling books with titles like "Homemade Munitions", "Poorman's James Bond", "How to get revenge", "How to disappear", "Bomb Making", etc. Don't remember seeing such a booth at the last GS though - guess the internet killed the books off.

Yes I am a little paranoid & always stayed clear of those booths, even though out of curiosity, I would have loved to look at some of the books! LOL

...bug :)
 
A friend of mine had all those Palladin books. They're a gimmick. I remember him getting all steamed up about a home made integrally-suppressed full auto 10-22. "They even have the plans inside the book.".

He wasn't any kind of machinist & at a quick glance from the untrained eye they looked cool.

Once you actually looked at the designs &specs for a few minutes from a machinist's viewpoint every single item had a vital measurement or piece of information missing. They really were as described "Only for educational & informative purposes. They just loved all the hype about being "The most dangerous publisher in Americas" so every wannabee basement James Bond (like my buddy) would rush out & buy them.:D
 
I remember all the late 70's early 80's BATF going bonkers at gun shows stuff. Some organisation, I forget who, was handing out 3X5" dayglo orange cards with a kind of "reverse Miranda" on it. You were cautioned to read EXACTLY what was on the card if you became suspicious because if they tried a sting after that it was guaranteed entrapment & would never get to court.
It went something like:
"ARE YOU IN THE EMPLOY, OR ACTING UNDER THE CONTROL, OR DIRECTION OF ANY FEDERAL, STATE, OR LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY"?

You could spot the shills from a mile off because they'd wince visibly when the vary obvious "yumyum yellow" card was produced.:D
 
"I think it's a bit of a stretch to think he's a government plant of some sort."
And a year or two ago you probably would have said the same thing if I came here and posted a government agency was collecting data on every last person in the US and storing it in a massive data center in the middle of nowhere in some western state(I forget where the NSA data center actually is, it may be in a big city in one of those mostly empty western states). That that agency was then distributing information unrelated to "terrorism" to domestic agencies in order to help them build cases and "build backwards" an admissible case for court.
As mentioned, the FBI is admittedly doing this to some extent as they regularly arrest people for trying to use "bombs" provided by the FBI. I find the behavior shameful, but I am sure it is keeping us safe at only a small cost to our liberty and I am part of a small minority who are concerned.
The number of people directly employed by federal law enforcement/intelligence agencies is unbelievable. I'm not sure anyone could come up with an accurate number for contractors. Most of them have to be doing something.
Luckily, large bureaucracies never seem to be firing all cylinders at once. Just as the NSA was unable to stop the Boston bombings even though, in hindsight, there was a good bit of warning signs, the government is probably too incompetent to execute any of the sort of programs that came up in your conversation. Gathering information is a whole lot easier than figuring out what to do with it.
At some point in this conversation Three Felonies a Day becomes relevant.
 
Last edited:
FBI crime lab; WV....

In the mid 1990s, during the height of the "Waco" event & Ruby Ridge. A group of "Bubbas"(a derogatory term used for domestic terrorist subjects by the DoJ/FBI) were busted in a Eat & Park diner near Clarksburg WV. :rolleyes:
These hapless "political activists" openly discussed blowing up the FBI's crime lab in nearby Clarksburg West Virginia. The diner waitress, being a good American, called the cops & reported the group. The entire plot was disbanded by these blabber-mouths. :D

I'd add that in the early 2000s, the local gun show in my metro area had a strange guy posing as the author of The Turner Diaries. :rolleyes:
He was young, fit, covered in gang & "white-power" tats. One big problem. The real author of the book, profiled on CBS News/60 Minutes died about a year before the gun show book signing. He also looked nothing like the IL Nazi at the booth(surrounded by a few state troopers :rolleyes:).
The FBI supervisory agent who was tasked with starting & managing the elite HRT unit made every sworn FBI agent in the team read The Turner Diaries. The incident about the book is detailed in No Heroes.
 
It only makes sense to be circumspect when talking to strangers about anything. He could have been a Fed or he might just have been a paranoid nut case. Or just making conversation.
I was once approached by the leader of a military type survival group and asked to make a field survival kit for them. I wanted to associate with these guys about as much as I want to catch a deadly disease. I declined. Later they were all arrested and he was revealed as a Fed undercover insider. Happens.
 
During the Clinton admin, there was a husband / wife team that attended all the local guns shows in my area that were like this. They even carried around a copy of “The Turner Diaries” just like a super religious person would carry around a Bible. I must be a magnet to people like this, because at every gun show for about three years straight, they would stop me to talk. Like a love sick puppy they would follow me around yakking in my ear. I would just smile and nod at them. Maybe I should have told them to get lost? I have no idea what ever happened to them, haven’t seen them in years. The thought of them being some sort of government plant did cross my mind a few times. Highly unlikely, but plausible.
 
During the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s it was said you could easily identify the undercover agentsand infiltrators in racist groups-they were the ones always advocating violence,"rough stuff",3 minutes after you met them they were talking "kill" or "blow up"and "Do you know where I can get?" Also they try to sow doubt and mistrust.
"The Turner Diaries" ?-just a fantasy for some very frustrated indivduals.
 
If someone starts bugging you, just tell them you're with the FBI here to recruit people for their new "narc out your friend for beer" campaign. ;)

The amount of more fringy stuff at these events is one reason I don't go to them any more.
 
We're really not discussing a civil rights issue at this point. Have there been fifth columns and agent provocateurs? Possibly. If someone has concrete evidence of one, by all means start a new thread.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top