The Reload reports that Marvin Richardson, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, is being demoted and replaced by U.S. attorney Gary Restaino. Richardson, a career ATF official, has now been twice passed over for the permanent leadership post, and once demoted.
Meanwhile, Biden’s first choice for permanent director of the agency, anti–Second Amendment activist David Chipman, had to withdraw after a few red-state Democrats joined Republicans in opposing him. Setting aside Chipman’s radicalism, he also happened to be completely underqualified for the job. Last week, Biden nominated a similarly political candidate, Steve Dettelbach, a milquetoast apparatchik from Ohio who the president probably thinks can sneak through opposition.
It is likely that Richardson was fired, as Stephen Gutowski reports, because of a New York Times piece featuring grousing gun-control activists calling Richardson “an industry-friendly subordinate pumping the brakes” on Biden’s anti-gun agenda. It’s clear from the piece that gun-control groups want the ATF to punish gun manufacturers — for existing as an industry, not for breaking any laws — and limit legal gun ownership, which, needless to say, isn’t its charge. They’re mad at Richardson for failing to treat gun groups as terror organizations and for his reluctance to crusade for more gun control. While the ATF director answers to the president, Democrats seem to want the agency to bypass Congress to implement, rather than to enforce, laws. That’s not how this works.