Ross: What does it mean for a ‘Gun grabber’ to be sworn into ATF?

Former U.S. Attorney Steve Dettelbach has been sworn in as the new head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. He’s the first permanent director in seven years. It took that long because previous nominations were scuttled by fears of the ATF being run by a gun grabber.

And that’s what some groups called Dettelbach too. “Stop gun grabber Steve Dettelbach,” said the American Firearms Association. “Biden names aspiring gun grabber Steve Dettelbach,” said Red Voice Media.

What I don’t get is why they find gun-grabbing, threatening, because that’s the ATF’s job. To grab guns from bad people before they can use them on good people.

And Dettelbach seems determined to do that because he knows how it feels to be a target, “as somebody who’s a prosecutor and as somebody who’s raising Jewish children. As a religious minority in this country.”

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“I spent time in Pittsburgh, I talk to people at Tree of Life Synagogue. When I was U.S. Attorney the largest mosque in my state was torched. An African American church was torched.”

“We caught a fellow in Toledo somebody who had shot three people and killed one and we found him in Toledo with 18 weapons, 40,000 rounds of ammunition, a Kevlar vest, and surveillance evidence that he was scouting out and following the head of the Jewish Community Federation and the head of the NAACP in Detroit,” Dettelbach continued. “Thankfully, the Joint Terrorism Task Force caught that person.”

Caught that person and presumably grabbed his guns because a person like that should have his guns grabbed.

In the case of the shooting at the Greenwood Park Mall in Indianapolis, a mall that had a no-gun rule.

By the way, I wish that rule had been enforced against the shooter … and I’m glad it wasn’t enforced against the guy who shot the shooter.

That’s the key to good gun-grabbing, to grab them only from people who can’t be trusted with them.

But here’s an even better solution, for trustworthy gun owners and gun sellers to keep a firm grip on their guns and not let them be grabbed or purchased by anybody they cannot personally trust with a deadly weapon.

For all this talk about government gun grabbers, the ATF has all of 2700 special agents to cover the whole country. Even if they had the street addresses and daily schedules of every armed bad guy in America, they couldn’t begin to grab their guns. That’s why it’s up to you.

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