President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) made fun of first-time gun owners who bought up weapons during mass government lockdowns as cartoon doomsday preppers.
During an interview with Cheddar in April last year, gun control activist David Chipman, who was nominated Thursday to the executive post at ATF, said those purchasing firearms put “themselves and their families and danger.” Chipman also compared them to Joe Exotic, the Oklahoma zookeeper profiled on Netflix’s “Tiger King.”
“Most of the new buyers who went out to the gun store and bought a gun have no training whatsoever,” Chipman said. “In their mind they might be competent, they might think they’re die-hard and ready to go, but unfortunately they’re more like Tiger King.”
Chipman’s recommendation as a longtime government bureaucrat who served 25 years at ATF was for new gun owners to “secure that gun locked and unloaded and hide it behind the cans of tuna and beef jerky that you’ve stored in the cabinet, and only bring that out if the zombies start to appear.”
The administration’s latest nominee to the bureau tasked with enforcing the nation’s gun laws comes with a long resume of aggressive activism for stricter restrictions on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. After two and a half decades in the ATF, Chipman worked as an adviser to the anti-gun group launched by former Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot in a 2011 Tucson shooting.
After the news broke of Chipman’s impending nomination on Wednesday, Chipman took cues from past nominees in the Biden administration and locked his Twitter account to prevent anyone from searching his prior posts.
Biden made the nomination in a Thursday press conference in which the Democrat launched a new effort to implement stricter gun control in the aftermath of deadly shootings in Georgia and Colorado last month. Biden called gun violence in America an “epidemic” and an “international embarrassment” at the White House.
At the afternoon event, Biden employed doomsday language to raise hysteria around firearms with terms such as “ghost guns” to warn Americans of rampant gun violence, which, in Biden’s eyes, can only be deterred through government restrictions on the firearms — as if criminals followed the law.