Marvin Richardson, long-time Deputy Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), has been fast-tracked to the unemployment line after he was given the option of voluntary retirement or forced removal. Richardson had been with the ATF for decades, serving under numerous administrations with his record stretching back to the 1993 conflict in Waco, Texas, leaving seventy-six Branch Davidians dead, including over twenty children, a massacre for which he was awarded the Treasury Department’s Hostile Action Medal.
Richardson is the latest holdover to part ways with the ATF as the Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) under Pam Bondi seeks to clean house at the agency after its political weaponization by the Biden administration. Earlier this year, ATF Chief Counsel and fellow anti-gun sweetheart Pam Hicks received her walking papers and was subsequently replaced by Second Amendment scholar and professor, Robert Leider, but not before doing her fair share of damage alongside Richardson by targeting the firearms industry and American gun owners with unconstitutional regulation and prosecution for years.
Richardson, who saw pistol stabilizing braces as an affront to his beloved infringement, the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA), was an instrumental force behind the ATF’s declaration of war on Americans who had equipped firearms with them based on the agency’s previous rules declaring braces a non-NFA accessory. He was also one of the key tools in the Biden administration’s attack on privately manufactured firearms, for which the left has now attached the made-up moniker, “ghost gun.”
Another part of Richardson’s anti-America portfolio is the recently repealed “zero tolerance policy” which led to a 500% increase in Federal Firearms License (FFL) revocations. Thankfully, the only zero-tolerance actions this comrade needs to concern himself with now are the ones that exited him from his career bureaucrat position. But it’s not time to celebrate beyond some ceremonial pleasure received from Richardson’s recent misfortune, as more work must be done within a legislative capacity to secure and defend American gun rights against subversive elements inside our government that will undoubtedly rise with the next Democrat leader our nation is cursed with.
Richardson is a fine example of this. During the first Trump administration, he attempted to strike at pistol stabilizing braces, which the Justice Department had ordered the ATF to stay away from. Nonetheless, Richardson did oversee the issuance of cease and desist letters to Q, LLC over the brace-equipped Honey Badger, claiming it was a short-barreled rifle (SBR) despite being classified as a pistol by the ATF’s own standards. He continued by issuing similar letters to other manufacturers as well before his efforts were shut down by the Trump DOJ.
Richardson lay in wait for his moment, and in 2020, he and then acting ATF Director Regina Lombardo met with the Biden transition team, unbeknownst to the sitting Trump administration, to discuss plans to refocus and weaponize the agency, according to reports from a source inside the ATF who spoke to Ammoland News. Richardson had complained about the need for additional political support for his quest to criminalize countless Americans overnight through an abrupt shifting of the stabilizing brace goalposts. To nobody’s surprise, Richardson got just the support he was hoping for immediately after Biden took office, as the anti-Second Amendment roadmap had already been developed with the transition team.
It’s important to remember that just as these career bureaucrats acted as the political tools of a treasonous administration, as they do with any Democrat-led administration America is forced to suffer, the unfortunate inevitability is that they will end up doing so again at some point. Regulatory “rule” rollbacks and Executive Orders ebb and flow like the tide, with actual pro-American legislation being the only true long-term solution to the damage that has been done to the Second Amendment. Make no mistake, Richardson’s dismissal is a positive step forward, but not one that secures our Constitutional footing. Only when we see the repeal of major infringements, like the NFA, the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA), the Hughes Amendment, and the reigning in of rogue states violating American gun rights, will the Second Amendment truly be restored.
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