ATF Director Steve Dettelbach is on his way out the door and it can’t happen too soon.
The man has been an absolute disaster as ATF director. Worse, he’s been a walking clown show, taking an agency that was already the most poorly regarded federal law enforcement agency, even after the FBI’s shenanigans, and made it even harder for people to respect.
But now he’s going. From the moment it was clear that Donald Trump had won the 2024 election, it was over for him and everyone knew it.
At Cleveland.com, they decided to pen a puff piece on Dettelbach, an Ohioan, but in the process, they illustrated one of the big issues with the ATF and federal law enforcement as a whole.
His next move comes after a two-year tenure that Republicans — including U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, a fellow Ohioan who chairs the House Judiciary Committee — said trampled on gun rights. Republicans already are crafting plans to gut the ATF in President Donald Trump’s second term.
At a farewell event for Dettelbach on Friday, U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said he earned the respect of ATF’s agents and staff as well as of the bureau’s many law enforcement partners across the country.
“In everything you have done, you have reminded us why ATF does the work it does, why all of us came to law enforcement in the first place — to save lives,” Garland told him
The reason the ATF does the work it does is to overreach its authority, try to regulate things it has no business regulating, all while making it clear to the American public that they don’t even really know how guns work.
Let’s remember that under his watch, the ATF started running wild, showing up at a gun owner’s door to ask them about a firearm they’d recently purchased, despite no evidence of wrongdoing by the gun owner. We had an ATF inspector photographing records, which was illegal as hell, all under his watch. We had a raid in Arkansas that resulted in the death of an airport executive that could have been conducted hours earlier when the suspect was less likely to be armed or to resist as he did.
He said nothing about either. He didn’t see them as a real issue, despite a whole lot of us having a major problem with it.
Garland makes the ATF’s mission out to save lives, but lives aren’t saved by going after lawful gun dealers and law-abiding gun owners. It’s by going after criminals. Sure, the ATF does that some, but they overstep a whole lot, too. What’s more, other federal agencies do a whole lot more of that.
Yet I have no problem believing what Garland says about Dettelbach having “earned the respect of the ATF’s agents and staff.”
This is an agency that exists primarily to infringe on a constitutionally protected right. Its mission is to infringe on our right to keep and bear arms. Its job is to make our ability to defend ourselves from either criminals or a tyrannical government, and Dettelbach has tripped over himself to keep that mission going strong.
The fact that all the crap happened under his watch, as well as making the bureau look ridiculous with an inability to break down a firearm–something anyone familiar with those firearms should have been able to do, and they don’t feel the least bit of shame over it. Instead, it seems they like the guy who has taken an agency that was already disliked by the gun-owning population and made literally everything worse.
That’s the problem and Democrats don’t seem interested in addressing it.
Read the full article here
