SHOCKER: Former Senior ATF Official Now Working for Everytown

The ATF would probably like for you not to think of them as some enemy or, at a minimum, an opponent. In theory, they don’t have to be. They could focus on actual criminals instead of all the crap they’ve been up to over the years, all of which tends to amount to a horrific trainwreck in the long term, but they don’t.

Still, there’s a bigger issue, and that’s how cozy the ATF tends to be with gun control organizations.

For example, we have yet another official who left the agency and now works with a gun control organization.

Marianna Mitchem, ATF’s former Associate Assistant Director of Field Operations (Industry Operations), is now working for former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun group, Everytown for Gun Safety, according to a former ATF senior official who did not want their name used in this story.

Mitchem has turned on the ATF since joining Everytown, the former official said. She is reaching out to her former colleagues, trying to target Glock and Glock-type handguns.

Mitchem began her 20-year ATF career in 2005 as an IOI, an Industry Operations Investigator, who inspect gun shops to make sure their records and inventory are documented correctly. She worked unarmed and was never an ATF Special Agent, who are armed and charged with enforcing federal law.

…

The former ATF senior official who worked with Mitchem said she was smart, a good communicator but very anti-gun.

Things changed for Mitchem when former President Joe Biden appointed Steve Dettelbach to run ATF, the former official said. Mitchem was given more duties and responsibilities.

The former official described her as “Dettelbach’s puppet.” She was his “superstar,” and was responsible for ATF’s frame or receiver ruling and for going after “ghost guns.”

So this isn’t a new thing. Lee Williams, who wrote the above, said the former senior official said there’s only one anti-gunner in a senior role at the agency, which is good news, but I can’t help but note just how often people who work for the ATF go into gun control after leaving.

They never seem to go to work for Gun Owners of America, the NRA, or the NSSF. In fact, one might see the NSSF as a natural fit for a former ATF agent who doesn’t see lawful gun ownership as the problem. The NSSF works with the ATF on a number of programs, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to see it.

There might be some raised eyebrows at GOA or NRA bringing a former agent on, but they could do it if handled correctly. Plus, one of the big issues is that any who tried to work for pro-gun groups would run into those raised eyebrows because so many others have gone to the other side of the street already.

You cannot convince gun owners that the ATF doesn’t care about what they do when so many incredibly anti-gun people have reached senior positions in the agency and then go on to work in gun control afterward. No one is going to buy it.

Now, if there’s only one senior official left who is anti-gun, that’s a good start, but that person needs to be gone as well, and then the lower echelons need to be cleaned out. The ATF cannot look at American citizens exercising their constitutionally protected rights as the enemy. They can’t treat us like criminals. Not if they want cooperation.

The ATF agents who man a booth at SHOT Show have to be having a rough week there in Las Vegas, but it’s so many of their fellow agents who set the stage for that.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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