By: Kayleigh Hamilton
No one is more anti-gun than Joe Biden’s former ATF director Steve Dettelbach.
He has dedicated a huge portion of his career to taking guns away.
But he just admitted that he is terrified of Donald Trump.
There is no agency in the federal government that has attacked core constitutional freedoms more than the ATF.
Regardless of what their stated mission is, they have gone well beyond their constitutional guardrails over the years and attacked peaceful people who just want to be left alone by the feds.
Now that Donald Trump is in office again, however, everything is up in the air for the agents at the ATF.
Trump has a mixed record on guns and is not known for being passionate about this issue, but he also knows that gun owners played a big role in electing him for a second term.
Because of that, he is unlikely to go after gun owners using the ATF as a weapon the way Joe Biden did.
And Dettelbach is very concerned about what the future of the ATF is going to be under the newly-inaugurated administration of Donald Trump.
According to the Washington Post, “Nearly five months later, Washington is preparing for the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, who has denounced ATF and said he would roll back some of its policies when he takes office. At an NRA rally in May, Trump called Dettelbach, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, an ‘anti-gun fanatic’ and said his leadership has been ‘a disaster.’”
“Dettelbach resigned from his position Friday, making way for whomever Trump may appoint. He said he fears the Republican-controlled Congress will drastically reduce the budget of the 5,000-person agency — and there will be no one in the White House to fight back.”
The way Dettelbach described it is likely accurate. Trump may not be the one to initiate the cuts, but he is not going to stand in the way of congressional Republicans if they do it.
Whoever Trump appoints as head of the ATF is probably not going to be a rabid anti-gunner either.
The article continues, “Republicans have long viewed ATF — which is part of the Justice Department — as a political entity, saying it aims to regulate guns beyond what the Second Amendment allows. More than a half dozen Republicans in Congress have called for abolishing the agency to protect gunowners from ‘bureaucratic overreach.’”
It will be a huge relief to gun owners if the Trump version of the ATF is tamer, slimmer, and much less threatening than before.
Of course, it will be an even bigger relief to gun owners if Trump simply gets rid of the ATF so it can’t do any more damage to the Constitution in the future.
Whether Trump is willing to go that far remains to be seen, as he has a lot of other priorities that seem to rank ahead of it.
But if gun owners keep up the pressure on him, perhaps he will make them happy and eliminate the ATF, much to Dettelbach’s chagrin.