By: Anthony Morelli
The ATF is at a crossroads like never before.
Donald Trump holds all the power over this controversial agency.
And one nasty fight that just erupted could decide the future of the ATF.
The controversy over Kash Patel’s appointment as head of the ATF continues to spiral, and both sides are escalating this battle as it heats up even more.
Not long after Congressional Democrats wrote a letter demanding that Patel be removed from his position, gun organizations fought back in defense of Patel against these Democrats.
The Democrats are worried that Patel is not going to be sufficiently enthusiastic about enforcing gun control on Americans, and they want someone who is more on board with the agency’s mission.
The problem is that the mission of the agency is incompatible with the Constitution, and incompatible with the promises that Donald Trump made during his campaign.
This means there is no way Trump is going to give these Democrats what they want and appoint a full gun-grabber.
And now there is massive pushback from gun organizations against the Democrats who demanded that Patel be removed from the ATF.
According to The Truth About Guns, “After 14 Democrat members of the U.S. House of Representatives wrote a letter to President Donald Trump asking him to remove Kash Patel, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), from his leadership post, one gun rights group is leading the resistance to the request.”
“The letter didn’t sit well with the leaders of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), who suggested in a news release that the lawmakers ‘pound sand,’ while also pointing out some of the lies in the letter.”
Whether the falsehoods in the letter were lies, as the article suggests, or simply based on ignorance is unknown.
However, the letter was extremely unfair to Patel and was based on ideological concerns that are highly unlikely to resonate with the Trump administration.
Here’s part of what the letter said: “Apparently, everybody who signed that letter slept through last year’s stunning revelation that the FBI’s initial report of a 1.7 percent decrease in violent crime from 2021 to 2022 was quietly adjusted to show a 4.5 percent increase. House Oversight Chair James Comer launched a probe of this revision last October.”
The revision of these figures contradicts the letter’s claims about the danger of guns and therefore undermines the entire point that the Democrats who wrote it were trying to make.
Before bashing Kash Patel, they would be well-served to get more informed on the real statistics about guns and then come back to the table with a more productive set of proposals.
Patel is likely not going anywhere anytime soon, and even if Trump does eventually appoint someone else as head of the ATF, it won’t be the gun-grabber these people are looking for.
Trump has a mixed record on guns, but he is not going to do what these Congressional Democrats want him to do.