Dettelbach Gets One Final Puff Piece from D.C. Media Before He Exits Stage Left

Former ATF Director Steve Dettelbach formally stepped down from his position last Friday, leaving Acting Director Marvin Richardson in charge of the agency for the foreseeable future. As Dettelbach headed for the exit, the Washington Post penned a mostly glowing tribute to Dettelbach’s tenure that included whoppers like this one: 

In August, ATF Director Steve Dettelbach sat with the local police chief in a newly opened gun crime intelligence center in this Ohio city and discussed the uncertainties that lay ahead.

Congress had slashed nearly $50 million from the year’s $1.6 billion budget for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is responsible for regulating and tracking guns. The cuts meant no surge in agents to combat the typical crime rise during the summer months. No training classes for new officers to replace those who are retiring. And no keeping up with demands from local law enforcement agencies to operate the bullet-tracing machines that help them solve violent crimes. 

“The work we do is just wildly apolitical,” Dettelbach told the officials in Cincinnati, focusing on ATF’s crime-fighting efforts and expressing his hope there would not be more funding reductions in the future. “A lot of it is just noise. We’ll see what happens.”

Wildly apolitical, eh? That should be the case, but the ATF was not only politicized but weaponized under the Biden regime. Remember, Biden’s first pick to head up the agency was gun control activist and former ATF agent David Chipman, who was serving as a senior advisor in the gun control group Giffords when he got the nod. Chipman withdrew his nomination when it became clear that he didn’t have the votes in the Democrat-controlled Senate to get confirmed, and Dettelbach, who was widely viewed as just as anti-gun but lacked Chipman’s track record as an activist, was tapped as Biden’s second choice. 

Dettelbach was responsible for implementing all of Biden’s executive actions on guns, including new rules restricting home-built firearms, pistol stabilizing braces, and person-to-person firearm sales. And since the creation of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention in 2023, Dettelbach worked hand-in-hand with the gun control veterans from groups like Everytown who were brought into the Biden administration as part of his whole-of-government attack on the Second Amendment, the firearms industry, and gun owners. 

Republicans have seized on some missteps, including the 1993 failed raid in Waco, Texas, that left four agents dead and the Obama-era “Fast and Furious” scandal to hammer on the agency while calling for it to lose funding and clout.

Nick Suplina, vice president for law and policy at the gun-control advocacy group Everytown, said such attacks ignore the agency’s day-to-day work, including prioritizing a zero-tolerance policy that shuts down gun shops that knowingly break the law. Gun rights groups argue that ATF goes too far in its enforcement and shuts down stores for paperwork errors.

“ATF is the most important agency you’ve never heard of. It is the only agency tasked directly with reducing gun violence,” Suplina said. “When it is well funded and well led it is really effective in doing that. The agency needs to be protected from some of the extreme voices in this political environment.”

If Dettelbach had contented himself with going after straw buyers, gun traffickers, and violent criminals Suplina might have a point. Instead, however, Biden and Dettelbach turned the agency into a gun control group with law enforcement powers. The “zero tolerance” approach to FFLs resulted in a huge uptick in the number of license revocations, often for minor clerical errors that weren’t proven to be “willful”. The Washington Post failed to inform its readers that Dettelbach’s final days in office the ATF withdrew those “zero tolerance” policies instead of defending them in a lawsuit brought by Central Texas Gun Works founder and 2A activist Michael Cargill. 

As the Texas Public Policy Foundation reported last week:

The new enforcement guidance reinstates the decades-long understanding that an honest mistake – like writing “USA” in the field for “county” on a background check form – is not a willful violation of federal law. “For purposes of the regulatory provisions of the GCA, the terms ‘willful’ and ‘willfulness’ mean a purposeful disregard of, a plain indifference to, or a reckless disregard of a known legal obligation. Willfulness requires fact specific application of law,” says the new guidance.

Crucially, it also adds that “Not every repeat violation is per se willful. A single, or even a few, inadvertent errors in failing to complete forms may not amount to ‘willful’ failures even where the legal requirement to complete the forms was known.”

Now that Dettelbach is out, who will Trump name to replace him? We’ve heard a number of names bandied about, including former ATF whistleblower Peter Forcelli, National Shooting Sports Foundation senior vice president and general counsel Larry Keane, and Blake Masters, the former U.S Senate and House candidate in Arizona who’s been highly critical of the agency’s actions over the past few years. 

Any one of those individuals would be a marked improvement over Dettelbach, but it’s unclear when Trump will decide on his selection. The sooner the better, because whoever Trump picks will have their work cut out for them when it comes to cleaning house and ridding the agency of the influence of the gun control lobby. 

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