David Chipman, Biden’s ATF Nominee: A lifetime of Anti-Gun Activism ~ VIDEO

Editors Note 5/24/2021 This article has been updated to remove a supposed image sourced from the dailymail.co.uk that was reported by them as a photo of David Chipman at the Waco Siege. AmmoLand News has been unable to confirm the accuracy of that claim and out of an abundance of caution has removed that controversial image.

Pres. Biden: “Today I’m proud to nominate David Chipman to serve as a director of the AFT.” https://t.co/EWPcEq5VY5 pic.twitter.com/KjDGSebd8f

— ABC News (@ABC) April 8, 2021

Florida, USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- David Chipman – President Joe Biden’s nominee for director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives – is in trouble.

The entire gun community is rallying against his nomination, and for good reason.

Despite last-minute efforts to conceal his past – Chipman recently switched his Twitter account to private – there is a mountain of publicly available information about the man President Biden wants to oversee the ATF and its vast resources and regulatory authority. But he can not hide all of them and you can still read many of his tweets supporting gun control many here and here

Media interviews, congressional testimony, and stories he wrote himself paint a very clear picture about Chipman – a picture that should prove useful for lawmakers during his upcoming Senate confirmation hearings.

These accounts show that Chipman is a lifelong gun-control activist and that he does not let truth or facts get in the way when he is lobbying against gun rights.

David Chipman A Gun Control Activist

Not only does Chipman harbor strong anti-gun views, he has worked for two of the country’s largest and most active gun control organizations.

Up until the day President Biden nominated him to serve as director of the ATF, Chipman was the senior policy advisor for the Giffords gun control group — a position he held for five years.

Before joining the Giffords, he was a policy advisor for Everytown for Gun Safety. As a senior policy advisor, Chipman lobbied for gun control legislation and testified before Congress on behalf of his employers.

In 2019, he told the House Judiciary Committee that the American firearms market was “flooded” with foreign made ARs.

This claim is far from true.

With a few exceptions – very few—most ARs are manufactured in the United States.

This falsehood and several others led the National Rifle Association to say this about President Biden’s pick for the ATF:

“Chipman’s views on the Second Amendment and his work as a gun prohibitionist should disqualify him from serving as the Director of the ATF,” the NRA said in a written statement.

The NRA is not alone in their opinion.

Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb told the Washington Free Beacon Chipman is “a tool of the gun prohibition lobby he’s worked for and that his nomination is an attempt to politicize the ATF.”

“The bottom line is we will have the ATF working against gun owners rather than being a neutral government agency to enforce laws,” Gottlieb told the newspaper. “We’re probably going to have what I would consider to be a very rogue ATF. … Everybody in the whole firearms community and Second Amendment community is going to pull out all the stops to fight the confirmation.”

And Larry Keane, senior vice-president for Government and Public Affairs, Assistant Secretary and General Counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, pointed out in a column that millions of Americans have chosen to “take responsibility for their own safety in times of uncertainty when law enforcement is spread thin, prisons are being emptied and prosecutors are refusing to prosecute criminals. Gun control advocates like Chipman, are losing their minds.”

“They are seething mad the ‘unwashed masses’ of the American public would dare to think for themselves, take responsibility for their safety and exercise their rights. They’re losing influence and they know it. That’s why they’re throwing fits. They know they have lost a generation of fence sitters,” Keane wrote. “Don’t go away mad, Chipman. Just go away.”

David Chipman LinkedIn A Gun Banner

In 2018, Chipman said ARs “should be regulated like machine guns.”

“What I support is treating them just like machine guns,” Chipman told Hill.TV’s Buck Sexton and Krystal Ball. “To me, if you want to have a weapon of war, the same gun that was issued to me as a member of [the] ATF SWAT team, it makes sense that you would have to pass a background check, the gun would have to be in your name, and there would be a picture and fingerprints on file. To me, I don’t mind doing it if I want to buy a gun. These policies just protect the criminal. Like, I don’t think you should be able to anonymously purchase 20 AR-15s at one time, and the government shouldn’t know. I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all that you have to pass a background check to own a weapon of war.”

David Chipman No Respect for Law Enforcement

In January, in a guest editorial for the Roanoke Times, Chipman denounced Second Amendment sanctuaries and called sheriffs who refuse to enforce anti-gun law “renegades.”

“In response to a clear voter mandate for Virginia’s new legislature to pass gun safety laws, a wave of local governments in Virginia have declared that they are ‘Second Amendment sanctuary’ or ‘constitutional’ counties. These pledges from local officials to blatantly ignore gun safety laws are fueling wild falsehoods about government overreach, while also putting Virginians at risk from the very gun violence lawmakers have sworn to prevent,” Chipman wrote. “Renegade sheriffs and local officials are claiming that these sanctuary designations allow them to block regulations that violate gun owners’ freedoms. But the Second Amendment envisions firearms as being ‘well regulated,’ and individual sheriffs aren’t entitled to decide whether a particular regulation is constitutional — that’s the job of the courts.”

Ultimately, he wrote, the actions of these “renegade” sheriffs will result in more deaths.

“Survivors and families are precisely the vulnerable citizens Virginia’s sheriffs should prioritize protecting. Instead, across Virginia, their safety is being bargained away or simply ignored. It’s shameful that renegade sheriffs who swore oaths to protect the most vulnerable among us are choosing to neglect this duty and value unregulated access to guns above the lives of their neighbors,” Chipman wrote.

In September of last year, in an article he wrote for the Giffords blog titled “How to Build Credibility in Law Enforcement,” Chipman wrote that he recently “spent time this summer reflecting on the tragedies of George Floyd’s killing and the shooting of Jacob Blake and the many other shootings of Black men and women at the hands of law enforcement.”

“Instead of an openness to evaluating the actions of our colleagues in law enforcement and admitting missteps and misconduct with honesty and transparency, too often, there is silence—a silence which breeds complicity,” Chipman wrote.

David Chipman A True Believer in Micro-Stamping

Like most gun control activists, Chipman believes microstamping can reduce violent crime.

Microstamping involves the use of a laser to engrave identification numbers onto a gun’s firing pin – numbers which are then transferred onto the primer of a spent round, which proponents believe can then be recovered by police at a crime scene and traced back to the suspect’s gun.

“Intentional firearm microstamping offers an important addition to the tools available to law enforcement—it’s time to encourage firearm manufacturers to include this life-saving technology in their products,” he wrote in a 2019 article for Police Chief magazine.

Microstamping – it should be pointed out – can be erased in about five seconds with a simple nail file.

David Chipman Won’t let facts get in the way of a FAKE Good Story

According to Newsweek, in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” post last year, Chipman claimed that during the deadly 1993 siege at Waco, Texas, Branch Davidians shot down two helicopters.

“At Waco, cult members used two .50 caliber Barretts to shoot down two Texas Air National Guard helicopters,” Chipman wrote.

The Branch Davidian compound was ringed by media during the 51-day standoff. Not one journalist reported the loss of any helos.

David Chipman A Consummate Fudd

Chipman has mentioned in several interviews that he’s a “gun owner,” as if that lends his anti-gun views additional credibility.

Most gun owners know there is a term for gun prohibitionists who claim they also own guns – a Fudd.

For most people, the mere fact Chipman might own a pistol or two neither excuses nor negates a lifetime of gun-control activism.

Chipman did not respond to messages seeking his comments for this story.

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About Lee Williams

Lee Williams, who is also known as “The Gun Writer”, has been writing about the Second Amendment, firearms, the firearms industry, and the gun culture for more than 10 years. Until recently, he was also an editor for a daily newspaper in Florida. Before becoming an editor, Lee was an investigative reporter at newspapers in three states and a U.S. Territory. Before becoming a journalist, he worked as a police officer. Before becoming a cop, Lee served in the Army. He’s earned more than a dozen national journalism awards as a reporter, and three medals of valor as a cop. Lee is an avid tactical shooter.