Marvin Richardson was, at times, the guy running the ATF. When there wasn't a director, he filled that role. When there was, he handled the day-to-day operations to some degree or another.
Now, he's gone, and the truth of the matter is that it should have happened much sooner.
Richardson was forced to retire last week:
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.”
As bad as all of that is, the truth is that there's one major reason why he should have been gone sooner, and it has nothing to do with gun control. Sure, that factors in, too, as it should, but three little letters doomed Richardson from the get-go.
DEI.
I'm not saying Richardson was necessarily a DEI hire, mind you.
No, this is about how Richardson moved Lisa T. Boykin from her role as "Chief Diversity Officer" to "Senior Executive," a role that did not exist in the ATF's leadership prior to President Donald Trump taking office. This followed the executive order laying off DEI staff throughout the federal government.
It might have been one thing if this were simply an open position that Boykin happened to be qualified for. It wasn't. He just changed her title to avoid the layoff.
That was indicative of a determination to undermine the Trump administration from the start. As such, that alone should have warranted him being shown the door. The fact that he's also an anti-gunner is just the icing on the cake, in a way.
Yet, when you couple these two facts, it's clear that Richardson was never going to function in Trump's ATF, especially now that it looks like we might get an ATF that will at least consider going after actual criminals and not law-abiding citizens.