What The Trace Thinks Kash Patel’s Tenure at ATF Will Bring

I thought I was done writing about what various people think Kash Patel will do at the helm of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. After all, a lot of the same ground was being tread and in the end, it all pretty much boiled down to the same thing, though sometimes via different mechanisms.

Regardless, I thought I’d covered all of that ground.

Then The Trace opted to weigh in, and oh boy, I just couldn’t help myself. I had to.

President Donald Trump’s February 24 appointment of FBI Director Kash Patel to also serve as acting chief of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has stirred fears among former ATF officials and gun violence prevention advocates about a dramatic shakeup at the nation’s top gun regulator. 

Patel will lead a workforce of more than 5,000 ATF employees charged with investigating violent gun crime and regulating the country’s sprawling firearms industry. 

“It’s pretty demoralizing,” said Mark Jones, a former ATF special agent who held various supervisory roles within the agency before retiring in 2011. “This guy doesn’t like the ATF and doesn’t believe in firearms regulation. I just see him coming in with a wrecking ball.”

Don’t tease.

It should be noted, though, that Jones isn’t just some former ATF special agent. He’s also come out as an avowed gun control advocate who has been rather rude to pro-gun voices in public discussions of gun control. He’s also worked for the left-leaning Center for American Progress. More on that in a bit.

But the truth of the matter is that the ATF seems to be very short on actually catching bad guys and is very much involved in making life difficult for ordinary, law-abiding gun dealers and gun owners.

Or is it somehow acceptable for them to just knock on people’s door and demand to see the gun they bought the week before without probable cause of some crime being committed?

Chipman and other former ATF officials said Patel’s appointment also raises the specter of an eventual merger between the agency and the FBI — an idea that has circulated for years among Democrats and Republicans as a way to depoliticize the ATF and reign in perceived overreach.

A merger would require an act of Congress and force the FBI or another agency to take over the ATF’s regulatory functions in addition to its crimefighting duties. The ATF conducts compliance inspections at federally licensed firearm and explosives dealers and manages a national database used by thousands of state and local law enforcement agencies to trace the ownership history of guns used in crimes. 

In a 2015 report, the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, recommended that  the FBI take over the ATF, citing the latter agency’s persistent budget and staffing shortages. 

Arkadi Gerney, one of the report’s co-authors, said Patel’s appointment is not what he and his colleagues envisioned when they made their recommendation. He said the FBI is no longer the politically neutral organization it was in 2015, and he worries that Trump would only use a merger as a means of consolidating power. (Gerney serves in an unpaid role on an advisory board for The Trace. You can read our editorial independence policy here.)

Yeah, that’s right, that’s the same Center for American Progress mentioned above. In fact, Mark Joes was part of the report that made that recommendation.

However, Gerney is right about the FBI not being politically neutral these days. Then again, we also know that it wasn’t very neutral in 2015, unless you think it made a sudden and drastic shift just a year later when President Donald Trump was first elected.

In other words, what’s really happening is that they loved the idea of folding the ATF in with the FBI when they figured they could use the combination to really screw over gun owners as much as legally possible, and possibly even through extralegal means. Now that Patel is running both, though, that hope seems to have evaporated.

What The Trace put together is a lot of people who just don’t like Patel and are more worried about someone like him helming the agency, but without any real substance as to why, other than he’s unlikely to work to expand the ATF’s mission.

Yet that’s ultimately a good thing. The ATF doesn’t need its mission expanded and they don’t need to use FBI resources to harass ordinary Americans who choose to exercise their God-given, constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms.

The fact that it bothers The Trace and their so-called experts is all the more reason for me to celebrate the move.