Image courtesy NRA-ILA

Today, we have an urgent bulletin from the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA). NRA-ILA is the part of the NRA that does the actual lobbying on Capitol Hill, and has a separate budget and leadership. As you may know, the ATF still needs a leader since Biden’s nomination of David Chipman went down in Waco-style flames. Fact is, Biden’s new nominee, Steve Dettelbach, is every bit as bad on the Second Amendment as Chipman … he’s just smarter about not posing next to the still-smoking bodies of people he’s just cheerfully murdered. Here’s the NRA to explain what’s going on, and why you should care.

Gun Owners Must Stop (Another) Anti-Gun ATF Nominee

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It’s been a while since we’ve heard from humiliated Biden nominee David Chipman. That is, of course, a good thing. After the anti-gun lobbyist was withdrawn as Biden’s nominee to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) last year, he popped up, occasionally, to blame others for his failure to convince enough U.S. Senators that he was little more than a gun ban proponent who was likely to abuse the office of ATF Director to harass the firearms industry and law-abiding gun owners.

Now that a new nominee for Director of ATF has been announced, the folks at the Daily Beast, an online tabloid, thought it might be a good idea to see what Chipman had to say.

To nobody’s surprise, he still sounds bitter.

He seemed to complain about the difference between the announcement of his own nomination, and that of the new nominee, Steve Dettelbach, noting that Dettelbach was able to speak when Biden officially announced his nomination. He indicated that was good, then added, “That’s not how they played it with me.”

Chipman also pointed out that the current administration has made a “strategic move” that could help with the Dettelbach nomination. He seemed to applaud the demotion of the acting director of ATF, Marvin Richardson, who has over 30 years of service with ATF.

Despite Richardson’s long service, he has been cast aside for a devoted gun control advocate. Steve Dettelbach would likely be an adversary for a lawful industry, which was also a major concern for several senators with Chipman’s nomination. As U.S. Senator Angus King—an independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats—mentioned in a letter to his constituents, the senator could not support Chipman because he felt the nominee “could not be ‘a fair and objective regulator.’”

As an added emphasis to Chipman’s inability to be “a fair and objective regulator,” he was recently interviewed for Slate.com, where he was asked to comment about the Biden administration’s efforts to deal with violent crime. Part of his response included referring to the gun industry as “villains,” and implying that the industry doesn’t care about violent crime, because “gun violence is just really profitable.”

Forget being “fair and objective;” it sounds like Chipman wants all gun manufacturers out of business, or behind bars.

Chipman’s most recent outburst is an excellent reminder for why NRA members and other gun owners’ efforts to scuttle his nomination were so important. NRA-ILA went all in on stopping Chipman’s nomination, spending $3 million on a campaign that included television and digital ads, dozens of town halls, hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail, millions of total voter contacts, and a direct lobbying campaign aimed at informing senators that Chipman’s record disqualified him from serving as ATF director.

As we’ve already noted, Dettelbach appears to be just as anti-gun as Chipman. He has endorsed gun bans, restrictions on lawful firearms transfers, and further expansion of prohibitions on who can lawfully possess a firearm. Perhaps the only difference between the two is Chipman once worked for anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s astroturf gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, while Dettelbach was “only” endorsed by it when he ran a failed campaign to become Ohio’s Attorney General.

Ultimately, rejecting the latest anti-gun Biden nominee to head ATF will be just as important as the last. It seems unlikely the president’s handlers will ever decide it is no longer politically advantageous to keep trying to placate fringe, anti-gun extremists with virulently anti-gun nominees to head the ATF. Although their views are out of step with most Americans when it comes to promoting more gun control, the Biden regime seems to value the support of gun-ban proponents—or simply doesn’t want to feel their wrath. They have been rather testy, lately. One even recently gave Biden a D+ for his efforts.

Once again, it will be up to gun owners to make clear that a failed anti-gun politician has no more place at the head of the ATF than a failed anti-gun lobbyist. Please contact your U.S. Senators using the link below, and respectfully encourage them to oppose Dettelbach’s nomination.

Here’s the link: https://act.nraila.org/campaign/39866/