Daniel P. Driscoll

What ATF is really good at is violent crime.

If you talk to a lot of the U.S.

attorneys around the country, it is one of their favorite law enforcement groups because they're like the blue-collar officers who will get their hands dirty to build these really hard cases.

The other part of ATF, though, which I think probably a lot of your listeners experience more day to day,

is the portion that regulates guns in our nation.

And they've gotten—they get swung between administrations.

When an administration comes in and it wants to push gun rights down, or it wants to hold them down, or it wants to act, and it can't get through the legislator, it goes to ATF.

And so what ends up happening is every four or eight years, ATF will start to do a lot of things.

Like, they will make it harder for Americans to act on their Second Amendment rights and actually purchase guns.

They will make it so that if a gun owner or a gun store skips one line on a form where obviously the intent was there not to defraud, they will bring down these incredibly catastrophic consequences.

And so ATF rightfully has taken a lot of heat over the years for those kinds of actions.

What we are trying to do with ATF under President Trump and with the attorney general is return it to its roots of doing what it does best, which is going after violent crime in this nation.

President Trump is incredibly focused.

If you look at what's happening in D.C., and I assume we'll talk about the National Guard there, but ATF agents are playing an incredible role in getting guns fired.

from violent criminals off the streets, but empowering gun owners to be able to purchase guns under their Second Amendment who aren't violent criminals.

And so one of the things we're talking about with ATF is doing a complete rebrand and a complete shift and taking it from alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, and it's got a silent E for explosives, and move it over to something like being the Bureau of Violent Crimes, which is exactly what it's actually good at and what most Americans want it to be doing.

I think it's, as you acknowledge, Sean, it's such an incredibly complicated topic that if you look, I think, at soldier suicide, one of the leading indicators is in that when that moment, the soldiers having that dark moment is,

They have access to a firearm.

Even if we have instances where many times we had just asked the soldier that morning, how are they doing?

And they were fine.