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Feb. 24, 2025 - The David Knight Show
16:36
Will Trump Kill ATF? ATF Merged Into FBI — Call It ATFBI?
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so zero h says will he burn it to the ground And in their article, they actually reference, of course, the Waco situation, where ATF began, just to briefly recap, they called all the media to follow them out.
The code word for going in was called showtime.
That's why we have video of all of that stuff that transpired.
They go to an apocalyptic cult out in a compound.
Who is expecting the government to attack them at the end of time and all the rest of this stuff.
But of course, David Koresh, who they were coming after, had several situations where warrants had been served on him peacefully.
Sheriff served warrants, didn't have a problem with that.
Had been in court many times, had actually been found guilty of the things that were later brought in.
And after they got tired of waiting on April the 19th, the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto, where they burned everything down on April the 19th, so they did the same thing there, killing men, women, and children.
And of course, in the interim there, as the PR was out, they were talking about how...
The ATF was there because of allegations of child marriage and things like that.
It's an awful religious cult.
And I was absolutely disgusted to see the Christians throwing the Branch Davidians under the bus instead of the ATF. Since when do you justify using the ATF to investigate reports of child welfare?
That's not their authority, of course.
And so the whole thing was disgusting.
And when you put that back-to-back with what happened, At the tail end of the Bush administration, the Randy Weaver situation, it was all the same people.
It was the bureaucracy that was there.
And so now the question is, will they get rid of this thing?
Or will they keep it going?
Now the ATF has a very interesting history that we're going to talk about here, but this started to come together on Saturday evening.
The extraordinary move has some wondering if Trump might move to dissolve the ATF altogether.
Well, his very existence is an affront to the Second Amendment.
That whole shall not infringe stuff, well, if you took that seriously, you would never have an ATF. But, of course, Trump doesn't take that seriously.
He thinks that he can do gun control by executive order.
Gun Owners of America has lauded Patel as being fiercely pro-gun.
And Gun Owners of America is fiercely pro-gun.
They don't make any carve-outs like the NRA does.
The NRA didn't care about the bump stock thing.
They didn't want to fight with Trump.
Gun Owners of America took exception to it and opposed it because they understood the precedent that was being set.
Gun control by executive order.
It's even worse than gun control by Congress or courts in defiance of the Second Amendment.
It's even worse when one person can do it arbitrarily.
During his confirmation hearings, Patel skirted direct questions about whether civilians should be allowed to own machine guns or whether background checks are constitutional.
He said, whatever the court rules in regard to the Second Amendment is what is protected by the Second Amendment.
Is that right?
Are our rights subject to the approval of the Supreme Court?
How pathetic.
You believe that background checks for firearm purchases are constitutional?
I don't know the in-depths of it, but I think that's what the Supreme Court has said, Senator.
So the word would be Y-E-S, yes.
Can you say yes are background checks constitutional?
I can say whatever the Constitution and the Supreme Court ruled is the rule of the land.
And we're not the law of the land at the moment.
I'm not an expert on state-by-state background checks.
Do you believe civilian ownership of machine guns is protected by the Second Amendment?
Yes.
Whatever the court's rule in regards to the Second Amendment is what is protected by the Second Amendment.
I raise these questions because of an association I can observe between Mr. Patel and gun owners of America, a group staunchly opposed to firearm regulation.
Mr. Patel, let me remind you that as FBI Director, you would oversee critical responsibilities related to firearm regulation, including administering the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
Yes, it's constitutional.
It's in place for a reason.
Gun control.
And it's not constitutional.
Anybody that's not the government.
I'm concerned about your ability to do the job when it's not in alignment with groups like Gun Owners of America.
Going to demonize Gun Owners of America.
It's in place, so it's got to be constitutional.
It is, therefore it am.
I think, therefore I am.
I think it's constitutional, therefore it is constitutional.
That's the approach of the court system.
But, of course, we can all read, too.
We have Supreme Court interpretations.
Guess what?
It's written in English.
I don't need your interpretation.
It's plain English, as a matter of fact, and I can read the history behind it.
Yeah, we're going to outlaw machine guns.
That's how you get into the bump stocks.
And then once you get into the bump stocks, then you get into every other thing.
It is death by a thousand infringements or tiny cuts.
You know, that is the reason why, and I've said this before, it's the reason why the founders put that in there.
You know, for the First Amendment, they said Congress shall make no law.
Bridging these freedoms.
Because the Congress can just come in and arbitrarily do what they've done in Europe and in the UK and all the rest of this stuff.
Just in a fell swoop.
But you're not going to come in and take everybody's guns without creating a war.
A civil war.
And so you do it by gradual infringement, as Fauci said when he was going to run his vaccine war on us, Operation Warp Speed under Trump and under Biden.
He said, well, how do you get everybody to do this?
Well, you do it from the inside, you do it with chaos, and you do it iteratively.
You do it iteratively.
You infringe gradually on people.
It's a psychological warfare.
You know, interestingly enough...
The founders didn't know anything about psychology.
That was something that was created afterwards, but it's just human nature.
They understood what human nature is, and they understood the nature of tyranny.
Tyranny will be incremental with infringements, and that's how you get there.
There's nothing special about a machine gun, especially if everybody's got one.
So, if you're the only one with a pea shooter...
But anyway, last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi fired the ATS top lawyer, Pamela Hicks.
These people are targeting gun owners, she said.
Not going to happen under this administration.
Well, good.
There's some good stuff in the order.
But let's just understand that a lot of this stuff, before we start drinking the Kool-Aid of the Trump administration, let me just say this.
There's a lot of things that have happened very quickly.
And a lot of people are very upset.
Yeah, tune in to David to see if he's changed on Trump.
He's never going to change.
You're right, I'm never going to change.
I've been watching Trump and what he's done for decades.
And two weeks isn't going to change my mind on this guy.
Not even four years.
He goes for four years and he doesn't pull, he doesn't get us into war, he doesn't put on a pandemic or something else of that magnitude.
Fine.
Then we can talk about it.
I don't think we make...
It's always not a good idea to make statues to people before they're dead.
You never know what they're going to do.
And all we can do, you know, past performance is no indicator of the future, except when we talk about people.
And unless I see some dramatic change in his character, and I don't.
I've said this all along.
You're foolish if you trust politicians.
That's how they rule people.
Never trust politicians.
Always be skeptical.
Always be cynical about anything that they do.
If it looks like it's going to be good, applaud the policy, but not the person.
Because you never know if they're going to follow through.
Chaos.
So let's talk a little bit about the history of the ATF. The history of a very despised agency.
It began in the 1880s, and all the stuff that you see about moonshiners and all the rest of this stuff, they were called the revenuers then.
They would go around to collect federal revenue on alcohol.
So it was long ingrained for about 40 or 50 years, even before alcohol prohibition.
The revenuers were hated, you know, these mountain stills here in Tennessee and all the rest of this stuff.
And moonshiners is because of the revenuers.
I remember the Beverly Hillbillies and Granny.
Dang revenuers!
Then it turned into the 1920s.
It became, because they'd been dealing with taxes on alcohol, when they passed Prohibition of Alcohol with the 18th Amendment, it became the Bureau of Prohibition.
And then it was brought into the FBI in 1933. 1933. So all of this stuff about, oh, well, look, we've never seen this before.
Yeah, it was already in the FBI before.
But since they brought it in to run alcohol prohibition under the FBI. But then right away, they passed the 21st Amendment in 1933. So it was only there for a very short period of time.
And then alcohol prohibition ended.
So what do they do?
Well, they took people like Elliot Ness and the Untouchables, and they put them into the Alcohol Tax Unit.
They became taxmen.
And by the way, when they got Al Capone, of course, they got him not over alcohol prohibition, but they got him over taxes, okay?
So Elliot Ness and his guys learned that taxes are the way that you get people, right?
And so they were folded into the Alcohol Tax Unit, the ATU. And that went on until the 1950s.
And then what they did was they added tobacco to the Alcohol Tax Unit.
So then it became Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division.
So now they're out there collecting alcohol and tobacco taxes.
Then in 1968, the Gun Control Act.
The despised Gun Control Act.
And by me, anyway.
Probably by you, too, if you know anything about the Second Amendment.
The 1968 Gun Control Act, what they did was they put firearms under their jurisdiction.
So now they got alcohol, tobacco, and firearms in 1968. By 1972, they became an independent agency under the Treasury.
And then in 2001, with Homeland Security and the massive rearrangement of all these federal law enforcement divisions, they put the ATF under the Department of Justice.
So that's the history.
The bureaucratic history of this hated bureaucracy, the ATF. And so putting the ATF in Patel's portfolio can signal that the ultimate objective is to dismantle it.
I don't think so.
I've seen it moved around over.
I just told you how it's moved around from place to place.
So that would be a bold move for a president who comes into his second term with a decidedly spotty record.
Whoa.
Whoa.
Didn't expect to see Zero Hedge criticize Trump on the Second Amendment.
Let me see if this is their article or somebody else.
Yeah, it doesn't have anything else.
So this is actually Zero Hedge.
They had the temerity to criticize Trump because he embraced red flag laws.
Take the gun and do the due process later.
Not just the Second Amendment, but of course, Fourth Amendment as well.
Exceeding his authority, his first-term ATF imaginatively reinterpreted the definition of an automatic weapon to include bump stocks.
But again, that wasn't the real issue.
The real issue was gun control by executive order.
And what Zero Hedge and most of the press does not talk about is the fact that Trump banned pistol braces after he did the bump stocks.
By executive order, he banned pistol braces.
That was put in in 2019, and then he pulled it out in 2020 after the election because he needed more support.
So he got rid of it.
And then about a month or so before Biden takes over, and then Biden puts the pistol brace in, and everybody's like, look, does he put in a pistol brace by executive order?
Which Trump had already done.
And they conveniently not talked about it.
So then Trump promised to push for increasing The legal age for purchasing firearms as well.
So to say that he's got a spotty record?
That's an understatement.
So what will a president who despised and disregarded the Second Amendment and the Constitution will only do to this despised bureaucracy that has very existence in its entire history?
has been in defiance of the Constitution.
On February the 7th, Trump signed an executive order that sought to curtail federal infringements on rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment.
So he directed Attorney General Bondi to three things.
Number one, catalog and address all actions by administration that infringed on gun rights.
Number two, reverse the heavy-handed zero-tolerance or enhanced regulatory enforcement policy.
That's what they called it.
Zero-tolerance and enhanced regulatory enforcement policy.
By which enforcement actions against federal firearm licensees, many of them small businesses, skyrocketed nearly sixfold.
That is, putting it mildly, what the Biden administration decided to do was for any minor infraction or paperwork error that would normally have resulted in a small fine, they pulled these people's license to deal firearms away and shut the businesses down.
And I report on that many, many, many times.
So good.
I'm glad that they do something about that.
I would expect them to do that for their base.
Review how firearms and ammunition are categorized and thus regulated.
There is so much that should be done.
But I'm afraid that it's going to stop short of an outright shutdown of the ATF. But as the old joke goes, I have at the tail end of the Zero Hedge article.
Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms should be a convenience store.
Not a government agency.
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