The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) may get David Chipman as its first full-time director in seven years, pending Senate confirmation.
Chipman served 25 years as an ATF agent, monitoring firearms trafficking between Virginia and New York. Following his time at the ATF, he worked for two anti-Second Amendment groups—Everytown for Gun Safety, Mike Bloomberg’s lobbying group, and Giffords, an advocacy group founded by Gabby Giffords.
The Biden administration nominated Chipman to direct the ATF not because of his experience in law enforcement, but for his political lobbying. During his time as a lobbyist, Chipman fought for handgun licensing and registration, universal background checks, and a ban on modern sporting rifles.
Chipman’s qualifications aren’t his achievements in law enforcement. They’re his zeal for attacking the Second Amendment and ridiculing gun-owning Americans.
The Biden administration is looking to radically remake America, and this includes an unprecedented assault on the Second Amendment and law-abiding gun owners. Chipman holds several fringe views on the Second Amendment, such as his belief that the National Firearms Act can be used to regulate and effectively ban all semi-automatic rifles.
Chipman holds other bizarre beliefs that include outright fabrications. During a Reddit AMA (ask me anything), Chipman stated: “At Waco, cult members used 2.5 caliber Barretts to shoot down two Texas Air National Guard helicopters.”
This is false. There is evidence from investigations following the Waco Siege that prove, although the helicopters were fired at, no helicopter was shot down.
All of this should be very troubling to gun owners and Second Amendment advocates. However, there is an ironic layer to the impending circus of Chipman’s confirmation hearing. Much like Barack Obama, Chipman might be the biggest gun salesman in the world today.
If you’ve been to the gun store lately, you know how difficult it is to purchase a gun—any gun, let alone the specific one you walked in the door for. Gun sales soared throughout 2020. The initial spike in sales began with the COVID-19 outbreak, continued through a summer of left-wing rioting, and kept pace when the rash of anti-Asian hate crimes hit. The perpetrators of these crimes have now handed the baton to Chipman as gun sales continue to rise through 2021.
It is far from a foregone conclusion that Chipman will be confirmed by the Senate later this month. That would require a simple majority vote, and some say his “absolute ceiling” is 51 or 52 yes votes. Certainly, a lot of hard horse trading will be needed to get him to that point. Democrats representing gun-friendly states like West Virginia, Arizona, and Montana will have to carefully consider the effect that voting to confirm Chipman will have on their electoral prospects.
To the gun market, perception is reality. The COVID-19 outbreak didn’t actually turn America into “Mad Max,” and you’re more likely to get hit by lightning than become the victim of a hate crime. What matters is that people were, rightly or wrongly, scared of these things happening and took the opportunity to arm themselves, anticipating the potential for worse. Similarly, while Chipman still has a number of hurdles to become the first full-time ATF director in seven years, people are rightly afraid of what he will do to their guns if he is confirmed.
Americans who otherwise might have let their desire to own an AR-15 or interest in building an 80 percent lower go another week, month, or year in more normal times are instead doing anything they can to get their hands on one before Commissar Chipman lowers the boom and begins the process of registration and confiscation without legislative authority.
While there is value in an armed American population, perhaps we can do better than a well-regulated militia composed of men who panic purchased AR-15s and 80 percent lowers out of fear that the new ATF director is going to make their family home the next Waco.
For many on the left, Waco and Ruby Ridge aren’t shameful episodes in the history of federal law enforcement in America. They’re a good start toward disarming and cowing the American population into submission. To them, leaving the citizenry armed with six-shot revolvers and single-shot bolt-action rifles is a necessary step toward steamrolling the American public into everything else on the far-left agenda of Big Banks, Big Media, and Big Tech.
Guns aren’t the core issue at all. The left’s real issue with an armed population is it presents a constant specter of resistance and revolt. It is no mistake that the United Kingdom, a place where one must present ID to purchase a kitchen knife, has been turned into a prison island by its nominally “conservative” government. This is a country where preteen girls are raped and pimped out on an industrial scale by Muslim grooming gangs and elderly preachers are jailed for the crime of preaching the gospel.
This is what the Biden administration and its foot soldiers want for this country. You are not fellow countrymen with differing views of the Good, but evil obstacles preventing them from realizing heaven on earth—a “heaven” far more closely resembling the hell of a Brazilian favela or a Hieronymus Bosch painting than any Christian conception of paradise.
But first, they have to take your guns. To do that, they must confirm Chipman, whose primary qualification for public office is not his relatively undistinguished record in law enforcement, but his willingness to disarm his fellow Americans. It is no wonder that Americans are taking to the nearest gun store to buy whatever they can get their hands on in advance of a figure like this taking the oath of office.
