The ATF has announced a slew of rule changes that will work out pretty well for gun owners. That’s the good news, though it’s not exactly breaking news. This follows decades of the ATF maintaining a certain hostility toward anyone who exercises their right to keep and bear arms and those who sell them guns. “Zero tolerance” may have kicked off under President Joe Biden, but there’s never been any reason to think folks in the ATF were upset by the declaration.
Recently, Cam addressed a piece by ProPublica. It was supposedly taking issue with how President Trump rolled back “Zero tolerance” and made us all less safe. Cam has handled that one well enough, so while I’m going to talk about that ProPublica story a bit, I’m not going to retread the same ground.
Nor will I retread quite the same ground as Lee Williams, who rightly pointed out how ProPublica, which prides itself on its investigative journalism, basically just parroted whatever the anti-gun side said and ran their numbers without question. You should go and read that one, because it’s good.
But one part stuck in my craw, and not because of Lee’s take on things. Allow me to explain:
Marianna Mitchem spent 20 years at ATF, rising to Associate Assistant Director of Field Operations (Industry Operations).
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.
She was promoted to field supervisor in 2011, and by 2014, was put in charge of Industry Operations for ATF’s Phoenix Field Division.
She moved to Washington D.C. in 2017, when she became ATF’s deputy chief of Field Management Staff. One year later, she was promoted to Chief.
In 2019, Mitchem became ATF’s deputy chief of staff, and reported to ATF’s director. Just one year later, she became the chief of the Firearms and Explosives Industry Division.
…
A former ATF senior official who worked with Mitchem said she was smart, a good communicator but always extremely anti-gun.
Mitchem, however, features prominently as a former agent who currently works for Everytown for Gun Safety in America, the anti-gun organization funded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and headed up by the same man who runs The Trace.
Mitchem, via her former position as a senior ATF agent, has a certain gravitas among the masses. Clearly, she’d know about the issues around guns, gun control, and gun law enforcement. If she thinks this is a bad idea, it must be. Her joining a gun control organization must be an artifact of that, right?
The thing is, though, ATF agents never seem to leave the agency and then seek employment with the NRA, GOA, or NSSF. They always seem to land at anti-gun organizations, which doesn’t make a lick of sense unless the culture in the ATF itself is one of anti-gun crusaders. I know there are some ATF agents who want to do the job right and have no interest in the politics of it, and some are outright pro-gun and don’t want to jam up the law-abiding citizens. They want to go after the actual bad guys.
I get that entirely.
But it’s one thing to know that’s the case in the abstract, but another when it seems that every single ATF agent that leaves the agency and stays in the gun sphere at all ends up working for the people who want to ban everything.
Now, let’s extrapolate that to the agents many of us interact with directly. How many of them think they’re the only ones professional enough to handle that Glock 40? (Yeah, I know that dude was DEA, but the mentality is the same.) How many of them think there’s something wrong with you because you actually want a machine gun, or a destructive device, or a suppressor?
Couple that with how easily the ATF seems to slip into “zero tolerance” mode when Biden gives the order–and you can’t tell me they couldn’t have found a way to get people to fix paperwork errors right away if they didn’t want to drop the hammer, regardless of the policy–and slow to do anything to benefit law-abiding gun owners.
We don’t trust the ATF because the ATF seems to be filled with people who exist only to take our rights away.
Gun owners and the ATF should be allies. Neither of us wants armed criminals running around. Neither of us wants American guns exported to other countries for criminal use. We should be on the same side.
But the truth is that far too many people join the ATF expressly to screw with our right to keep and bear arms, which is why so many leave and land with Gun Grabber, Inc.
I’ll maintain that until we start seeing agents speaking out for the NSSF or some gun rights organization like we’ve continually seen with anti-gun groups.
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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