Anti-Gun Dems Clutch Pearls Over Patel Overseeing ATF

Capitol Hill Democrats aren’t breaking out their bingo paddles over Donald Trump’s decision to have FBI Director Kash Patel do double duty as interim ATF Director, at least not yet. Instead, they’ve sent a letter to the president objecting to the appointment, which is just as laughable as their performance during Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday. 

More than 80 members of Congress signed onto @HouseGVP’s letter raising grave concerns about Kash Patel serving as acting director of ATF.

President Trump must name a director who is qualified to oversee our federal gun laws and will work to keep us safe. pic.twitter.com/onUeV0For7

— GIFFORDS (@GIFFORDS_org) March 6, 2025

This is the same group who cheered when Joe Biden named one of their own as ATF Director; an appointment that flamed out when Giffords senior advisor David Chipman couldn’t get the support of Democrats like Joe Manchin and Angus King. An unabashed anti-gun activist like Chipman was completely acceptable to the anti-gunners, and that would have been the case even if he’d never worked a day at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. And though Patel has decades of experience on both sides of the law as a public defender and DOJ prosecutor, along with stints on Capitol Hill and the executive branch, he’d never pass muster with groups like Giffords or anti-gun Democrats because of his support for the Second Amendment and his previous comments about the need to rein in the ATF’s abuses of its authority. 

The Democrats on the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force claim that Patel has no experience “fighting crime, responding to mass shootings, or confronting domestic terrorism”; an odd complaint given that Patel was previously a trial attorney in the DOJ’s National Security Division and also served as the senior director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in Trump’s first term. 

Instead of acknowledging Patel’s past work, the anti-2A Dems refer to him as an “unqualified partisan” in their open letter to Donald Trump; a label that could apply just as well to Chipman or Steve Dettelbach, the former U.S. Attorney who was Biden’s second choice to run the ATF. 

What the anti-gunners are really upset about, of course, is that Patel (and the Trump administration) is expected to take a very different approach to the ATF than what we saw over the past four years, when Biden and his lackeys used the agency to do an end-run around Congress and enact new gun control laws in the guise of rules and regulations that went far beyond the agency’s statutory authority. The ATF was the tip of the spear in Biden’s whole-of-government attacks on the firearms industry and American gun owners, but under Patel’s watch things like the agency’s efforts to strip FFLs of their licenses because of minor paperwork errors and declaring almost anyone who offers a gun for sale from their private collection is “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms (and therefore subject to a host of federal regulations and requirements) are coming to an end. 

For all the impact that this letter will have on Trump, the House Democrats who signed it might as well have just taken their little signs and protested outside the White House. It’s unclear whether the president will appoint an permanent director of the ATF, but even if Patel only serves as interim director for a short period of time, the anti-gunners aren’t going to like whoever comes next any more than they like the man in charge now.