The Trump administration has announced several moves in recent days to bolster the right to keep and bear arms, including launching a DOJ investigation into the practices and policies of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department when it comes to issuing concealed carry permits. We’re still waiting, however, to see the administration start to roll back Joe Biden’s executive orders to the ATF that are continuing to impact lawful gun owners, sellers, and manufacturers.
Over the weekend the Washington Post ran with a piece that, if true, might help to explain why those changes have been slow in coming. The paper claims that acting ATF Director Kash Patel has largely taken a hands-off role at the agency. Besides his physical absence, the Post cited several anonymous sources who say there “appears to be scant communication between the acting director and the people who work for the 5,000-person agency”.
That doesn’t mean the ATF has gone dark, however.
So far, day-to-day operations have been fairly typical, according to people familiar with the agency, with Marvin G. Richardson, a department veteran, informally serving as the de facto head. ATF agents have been showing up to crime scenes and assisting with violent gun crimes across the country.
The FBI announced a task force that would work with ATF to address what Attorney General Pam Bondi has characterized as politically motivated attacks with homemade explosives on Tesla vehicles — a company owned by Trump ally Elon Musk.
But agency leaders have little contact with top Trump appointees at Justice or input into the administration’s anti-violence or gun-related plans, people familiar with the situation said.
The obvious explanation for that is that the administration doesn’t want to loop those ATF bureaucrats into their future plans, especially if those staffers aren’t going to be a part of them. It’s also possible that the administration hasn’t settled on a plan yet, and there are more than one idea being debated. The Post reported last week that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has proposed merging the agency with the DEA, for example, but that was essentially presented as a trial balloon and not a done deal.
While Blanche’s memo did not say whether the agency’s staffing would be cut, Emma Brown, executive director of the gun-control advocacy group Giffords, expressed concern that combining ATF and DEA would ultimately lead to fewer agents and resources.
“We want the ATF to be equipped with enough agents and resources to protect America from violent crime,” Brown said. “Putting someone in charge of it who has a full-time job somewhere else is not how you treat a serious law enforcement agency.”
Putting a gun control activist in charge isn’t how you treat a serious law enforcement agency, but that’s exactly what Joe Biden tried to do when he nominated Giffords senior advisor David Chipman to be ATF’s director.
Putting Patel in charge, on the other hand, may very well be a sign that the Trump administration has designs on the agency’s future. But as one Second Amendment advocate told the Post, while there are more than a few legitimate complaints about the ATF’s approach to enforcing gun regulations, there’s a bigger issue at the heart of the 2A community’s desire to see the ATF go away.
Luis Valdes — a former police officer and spokesman for the gun-rights advocacy group, Gunowners of America — said his group would like to see ATF abolished, and to have the Trump administration rescind the agency’s gun regulations as an initial step. One of those regulations, requiring serial numbers and background checks for ghost guns, was upheld by the Supreme Court on Wednesday. The Justice Department has declined to comment on whether it will keep the regulation in place.
“We would like to have ATF disbanded, that is the last step actually, not the first step. But the bigger issue is all the laws on the book,” Valdes said. “We would like to see all the draconian policies that ATF has created themselves to be repealed.”
It wouldn’t surprise me if Patel is paying more attention to his role as FBI director than his position as acting director at ATF, especially since Marvin Richardson (who’s pretty well respected by and certainly familiar to the firearms industry) is on hand to do the day-to-day stuff. But Patel doesn’t have to be in the building for the DOJ to give formal notice of Trump’s intent to repeal all of the Biden-era gun regulations, including the “frame and receiver” rule upheld last week by the Supreme Court, either.
The Trump administration hasn’t made a bad move on Second Amendment issues since his second term began. The biggest complaint from Second Amendment advocates is that he hasn’t made enough good moves over the past few months. There are worse problems to have, I suppose, but that doesn’t mean that 2A activists are going to be satisfied if Patel, Bondi, and other DOJ/ATF leaders continue to keep those problematic policies in place and in force.
Read the full article here
