The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) has coerced mentally disabled people into unwitting participation in undercover stings, and later arrested them for the actions performed during those stings, according to a new investigation released Monday by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

In several cities across the United States, the Sentinel found that ATF repeatedly used questionable tactics to try to further their investigations. A few of these involved paying or training mentally disabled people to involve themselves in crimes. For example, a man agents described as ‘slow-headed,” with an IQ in the 50s, was hired to work in a fake storefront set up by ATF. Undercover agents then encouraged by him to try to go out and find guns to buy. When he found them some, they arrested him, on over 100 counts of being a felon in possession of a gun.

ATF agents also once taught a man how to saw off a shotgun so that they could charge him with a more serious crime, and another time hired a felon to buy guns in a pawn shop, despite it being illegal for someone to knowingly sell a gun to a felon. And those are just some of the stories […]