{"id":70568,"date":"2021-08-06T10:47:24","date_gmt":"2021-08-06T15:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=70568"},"modified":"2021-08-06T10:47:24","modified_gmt":"2021-08-06T15:47:24","slug":"70568","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=70568","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Gun Control Activists Blame Biden As Chipman Nomination Nears Collapse<\/a><\/p>\n

On Wednesday, advocates for David Chipman told POLITICO that they were\u00a0pushing for a full vote<\/a>\u00a0to confirm the gun control activist as ATF director before the Senate starts its August recess. By Thursday afternoon, however, Chipman\u2019s biggest supporters appeared resigned to the idea that senators will most likely skip town without holding a vote and had started\u00a0pointing their fingers<\/a>\u00a0at the White House and Joe Biden himself over the crumbling prospects of installing one of their own as the head of the agency overseeing the nation\u2019s gun laws, regulations, and the firearms industry.<\/p>\n

Frustrations became evident during a Zoom call on Thursday afternoon with Cedric Richmond, senior adviser to the president and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement \u2014 the latest in months of meetings in which advocates have brought up Chipman\u2019s nomination.<\/p>\n

According to two people familiar with the call, a small group of survivors and those pushing firearms restrictions urged the White House to be more aggressive on the nomination. They also encouraged the administration to support ending the filibuster to allow firearms legislation to more easily pass the evenly-divided Senate, the people said.<\/p>\n

If Biden can\u2019t move senators like Joe Manchin to publicly support Chipman\u2019s nomination, how exactly is Sleepy Joe supposed to convince red state Democrats to nuke the filibuster? The White House isn\u2019t the hang up here, it\u2019s a number of Senate Democrats themselves who are the biggest roadblock in that regard. But with Chipman\u2019s nomination in serious trouble, gun control activists have to place blame somewhere, and they\u2019re certainly not going to blame themselves for pushing Chipman as a candidate in the first place.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cThe White House has really dropped the ball here and if Chipman is not confirmed that will be a significant letdown to survivors of gun violence across the country \u2014 and will have the effect of undermining their effort to reduce gun homicides,\u201d said Igor Volsky, executive director of the advocacy group Guns Down America. \u201cBiden told us during the campaign trail that this is a priority and the administration insists that he is in charge of driving this issue. He needs to step on the accelerator.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Volsky is, in my opinion, one of the most ineffective gun control advocates operating in Washinton, D.C. at the moment, so I\u2019m not surprised that he\u2019s the most vocal in terms of criticizing Biden\u2019s efforts. Larger, more established gun control orgs were more muted in their opinions on the White House involvement in the nomination process, at least publicly.<\/p>\n

After the White House was contacted for this piece, another gun safety group, Everytown for Gun Safety, reached out to praise the administration for being \u201cthe strongest gun safety administration in history\u201d and for \u201cfighting for David Chipman \u2026 in the face of a torrent of lies and disinformation from the gun lobby.\u201d Shortly after, Peter Ambler, executive director for Gifford\u2019s, another gun safety group, sent a statement saying \u201cPresident Biden has made good on his promise to combat our nation\u2019s gun violence crisis by laying out concrete steps we can take to save lives.\u201d Ambler added that Biden\u2019s nomination of Chipman underscored the president\u2019s \u201cbelief that a component of the administration\u2019s gun violence prevention agenda is a strong leader at the ATF.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just as an aside, POLITICO not only misspelled the name of the Giffords gun control organization, but failed to inform readers that the group is David Chipman\u2019s\u00a0current<\/em>\u00a0employer. Anyway, when gun control activists can speak on the condition of anonymity, their criticism of the White House is a little more pointed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe thought that once we elected a gun safety president and gun safety majorities in the House and the Senate that this new federal administration \u2026 would make gun violence prevention a top priority,\u201d said an advocate in touch with the White House. \u201cAnd they\u2019ve done a great job on the funding initiative but I just thought that the president would use political capital just in general to pass legislation \u2026 Somebody that\u2019s all in.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The absurd thing is that Biden really is \u201call in\u201d on gun control. He just doesn\u2019t have the political capital necessary to move most items on Democratic lawmakers\u2019 to-do list, which is one of the reasons why both the White House and the gun control movement want to place a true believer in charge of the ATF. Executive actions, both formal and informal, are going to be the primary engine for advancing Biden\u2019s anti-gun ideology. We saw this on Thursday when Biden urged Democratic Attorneys General to start\u00a0suing gun makers<\/a>\u00a0over violent crime; a strategy that comes directly from the gun control movement itself.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to declare victory prematurely, but if Chipman\u2019s nomination does end up falling apart gun control activists will have no one to blame but themselves. They saw Biden\u2019s election as a golden opportunity to install one of their own at the head of the ATF and believed that they could ram Chipman through the Senate over the objections of 2A groups like the NRA and the NSSF. Not only did the gun control crowd completely underestimated the passion and engagement from grassroots Second Amendment activists, they convinced themselves that Chipman\u2019s years of work as a paid gun control lobbyist would be outweighed by his 25 years at the ATF. Instead, several of Chipman\u2019s former colleagues have come out in opposition to his nomination; allegations of racist comments made by Chipman in the Detroit field office of the ATF have emerged; and Chipman\u2019s anti-gun zealotry and contempt for gun owners were enough to convince moderate Republicans like Susan Collins and Pat Toomey to declare their opposition to his confirmation.<\/p>\n

Chipman was never going to be a popular choice for ATF director outside of the gun control movement, and the grassroots energy in the gun debate is still clearly with Second Amendment activists and not their ideological opponents. Hopefully that matters to the few remaining red state Democrats still on the fence and will be enough to ultimately persuade them to reject the gun control lobby\u2019s golden boy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gun Control Activists Blame Biden As Chipman Nomination Nears Collapse On Wednesday, advocates for David Chipman told POLITICO that they were\u00a0pushing for a full vote\u00a0to confirm the gun control activist as ATF director before the Senate starts its August recess. By Thursday afternoon, however, Chipman\u2019s biggest supporters appeared resigned to the idea that senators will … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70568"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70569,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70568\/revisions\/70569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}