Undersheriff Dustin Bray said Tuesday that his office was not informed that a dozen agents in tactical gear armed with automatic weapons would descend on the home of a local Baptist minister and firearms dealer.
“We weren’t apprised of anything,” he reported. “We are a Second Amendment County, and we are going to protect our citizens here. We are not going to enforce any gun law or rule that violates the Constitution.”
Bray said the raid on Russell Fincher’s home could yield criminal charges, though that is a decision for the attorney general. “The thing I’m looking at are more constitutional issues than criminal, such as civil rights violations.” He confirmed the PCSO will look hard at the ATF’s conduct.
The start of the investigation was briefly delayed due to a double homicide in the county.
Fincher, who is also a high school history teacher, was a small FFL dealer who operated mostly at area gun shows. He also dealt a few weapons out of his home with a “kitchen table FFL, which was perfectly legal under federal law. But on June 16, he was subjected to a hostile raid in which he was handcuffed on his porch in front of his 13-year-old son and berated by multiple agents.
Only when he volunteered to surrender his FFL did the ordeal finally end, though agents confiscated up to $60,000 worth of firearms from his residence.
Bray added that the PCSO is very concerned over the ATF’s complete disregard for standard deconfliction protocols.
This is the process, as defined by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, “of determining when law enforcement personnel are conducting an event in close proximity to one another at the same time.”
SWAT raids are included in the list of “events” covered by this protocol.
