Anti-gun Chipman unsuited to run the ATF
By David Keene. August 11, 2021
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Imagine the uproar if Donald Trump or George W. Bush had appointed an NRA lobbyist to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). Liberals, Democrats, and the media would have gone nuts. Former New York Mayor Michel Bloomberg would have thrown a fit, and the nominee would have been excoriated in the media, pilloried during the confirmation process, and accused of every conceivable sin. He would never have been confirmed.
During the uproar, presidential advisors and friendly members of Congress would have advised the White House that appointing a committed activist had been a mistake. They would claim the Bureau entrusted with regulating the firearms industry and private gun-owners cannot be a sworn enemy or a loyal friend, but only an honest enforcer of existing laws and regulations regardless of the swirling and never-ending debates over whether those laws and regulations are too lax or too strict.
Knowing this, Second Amendment advocates would not have presumed to advise a friendly President to turn the ATF over to one of their own.
The anti-gun forces have no such qualms. No one apparently offered any such advice to President Joe Biden, who threw prudence and good judgment to the winds. Shortly after moving into the Oval Office, Mr. Biden appointed David Chipman, a paid lobbyist for a leading anti-Second Amendment group and a public advocate of firearms restrictions that would never pass Congress or stand up to Constitutional scrutiny. Mr. Chipman is the dream nominee of the gun control crowd allowing them to "go after" gun dealers, owners, and manufacturers, regardless of the letter or spirit of existing law or the prudent judgment one ordinarily seeks in regulatory appointees.
Mr. Chipman worked at ATF for some years before signing on as an anti-gun lobbyist but was even then more a gun control activist than an objective law enforcement official.