By: Teresa Mull

Biden’s would-be future ATF head has said some things that should terrify not only every gun owner in America, but every citizen who values his or her right to due process.

David Chipman is Biden’s pick to direct the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), and his Senate Judiciary hearing is tomorrow morning. Chipman is a career bureaucrat: he spent 25 years as an ATF agent and then worked as a lobbyist for Everytown for Gun Safety (Michael Bloomberg’s rabid anti-gun group) and is currently a policy analyst for Giffords, another notorious anti-gun organization.

Chipman has voiced support for every Biden gun control measure there is, and then some. The most disturbing thing Chipman has championed is arresting people before they commit a crime.

Yes, you read that right.

During a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) forum last year, one person asked about background checks, to which Chipman replied:

Yes. While at ATF I conducted studies involving people who failed background checks to determine how many later committed crimes with a gun—many did. This is a perfect opportunity to arrest people before committing crimes rather than responding after the fact.

You can read a portion of the rest of the thread below, and more of Chipman’s AMA here.

Not only is Chipman’s proposal Unconstitutional and insanely illegal, as one Reddit user notes, the background check system is wrong 99 percent of the time.

If Chipman were confirmed, he would do more than enforce Biden’s list of Second Amendment-destroying executive actions on guns. He would use the agency to target law-abiding gun owners, gun store owners, and gun and gun accessory manufacturers by changing the rules on what’s legal and what’s not. This is a person who wants to reclassify AR-15s, the most popular firearm in America, to be subject to the same regulations as a machine gun. That means getting your AR registered, having a permit to own it, and paying hefty fees to possess it.

Chipman favors expanding background checks, implementing a federal red flag gun confiscation law, outlawing so-called “assault weapons” and what he considers to be “high-capacity” magazines, cracking down on “ghost guns,” stabilizing braces, and silencers.

Chipman is a nightmare. Rather than going after guns, gun traffickers, or any real causes of violence in America, Chipman would rather sit cowardly in the ATF offices and dream up ways to make law-abiding Americans defenseless.

Teresa Mull ([email protected]) is editor of Gunpowder Magazine.