By Steve Neavling
One of the top elected officials in Missouri who is refusing to cooperate with ATF has a brother whose gun shop was raided by the agency.
Camden County presiding commissioner Ike Skelton wrote a letter to the ATF office in Kansas City earlier this month, declaring the agency is “unconstitutional” and violates “the rights of our citizens.”
“Under the Anti-Commandeering Doctrine, Camden County was the first county in Missouri, and possibly in the country, to pass an ordinance prohibiting any county employee from assisting your unconstitutional agency in violating the rights of our citizens,” Skelton wrote.
In 2021, his brother Kim Skelton’s gun store was raided by the ATF, which seized more than 300 guns and stripped him of his federal firearms license, Business Insider reports.
“I want folks to know, that there is a time in this country that we’re going to have to stand up and just say, ‘No.’ That we’re not going to deal with these things anymore,” Ike Skelton said in a November 2021 radio interview days after the ATF raid.
Skelton claimed his brother was victimized by an entrapment scheme perpetuated by the agency.
Jim Skelton said he was told he had incurred hundreds of infractions.
“How am I supposed to know that? I can’t just take their packet, slap it to my forehead and absorb it,” Jim Skelton told KRCG-TV at the time.
Jim Skelton was charged with 15 criminal counts, including allegations that he facilitated straw purchases and illegally sold weapons to undercover ATF agents, according to a December 2021 statement from the US Attorney’s Office of the Western District of Missouri.
In February, Jim Skelton admitted he was guilty of the charges in a pretrial diversion agreement, and the federal indictment against him would be dismissed if he “adheres to the conditions of the agreement for 18 months, which includes a prohibition against possessing any firearms,” a spokesperson from the US attorney’s office told Insider.
One of the conditions of the agreement is that he cannot receive a license to sell firearms again.
Skelton said the raid on his brother’s gun shop did not influence his decision to run for office.
“I support our Second Amendment very much. The only thing that my brother’s raid did was confirm everything I thought about the ATF,” Ike Skelton told Insider. “It’s just who I am. I had nothing to do with what they did or did not do to my brother. It’s not retribution.”
“They’re just not used to people standing up to them,” he added of the ATF, and “the federal government in general.”
