Robert Leider, Associate Professor at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, has taken over as the ATF’s Assistant Director and Chief Counsel.
This comes less than a month after the Trump administration issued walking papers to Pamela Hicks and showed her the door. The timing of the move couldn’t be better, as gun owners are losing patience with the process while watching other issues precede the Second Amendment and holdover idiots like U.S. Attorney Michael Simpson stating that suppressors fall outside the constitutional right to bear arms.
Notably, Attorney General Pam Bondi has become somewhat of a polarizing figure, as her history on gun rights is not sterling, and she is past due with her report regarding the President’s executive order on the Second Amendment. AG Bondi and President Trump, however, have indicated a new leaf on the subject, and regardless of the snags we’ve experienced, it is tempting to see appointments like Kash Patel to ATF Director and hires like Robert Leider as incremental steps in the right direction.
So, who is Rober Leider, and why should his new position within the ATF inspire a glimmer of hope for gun owners? Leider has earned his fair share of education with an undergraduate degree from George Washington University, a PhD from Georgetown, his J.D. from Yale, and he has clerked for the United States Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals. While this sounds impressive, it may also sound like he is well-versed in swamp culture, so we must examine his personal history to answer this question.
As Washington Gun Law President and legal expert William Kirk points out, Leider is “well on record as a public author of being a staunch, staunch supporter of the Second Amendment.” In a recent video on his YouTube channel, Kirk talks about a late 2024 journal written by Leider entitled Analysis: Gun-Rights Advocates Would Benefit More From ATF Reform Than the Agency’s Elimination. This is an important issue as many gun owners, myself included, have become understandably jaded by the agency and may not be seeing the forest through the trees on the matter.
“These people were targeting gun owners– not going to happen under this administration. And we’re looking to hire really great people,” said Pam Bondi.
This is a people problem, and as hard as it may be to hear, after years of abuse inflicted upon the Second Amendment community, a reformed ATF can serve Americans in a manner consistent with the Constitution. The agency can make defending our inalienable rights their number one priority. While I admit this is still a dream, I’d concede its possibility. I would invite an ATF that ceased all criminalization of Constitutionally protected activities and turned its focus to investigating and prosecuting violations of our rights federally, state by state, and municipality by municipality.
To this effect, Robert Leider has an extensive written record of his duty to and reverence for the United States Constitution and the Second Amendment. I encourage reading his written work, including the following suggested entries, if knowing him better interests you.
The Individual Right To Bear Arms For Common Defense
The General Right to Bear Arms
Legal experts and pro-Second Amendment organizations like Gun Owners of America have responded to the announcement with excitement, not only for Leider but also for AG Pam Bondi’s decision to bring him aboard. Could this signal a more complex chess game being played at the highest levels as pieces are moved into place one by one, with the goal being to restore the Second Amendment? Maybe, but only time will tell. My reluctance to pop corks, however, comes from knowing that while these measures may be effective at stopping some of the bleeding, we will need Congress to right laws previously put in place that violate the Constitution, a task outside the unilateral authority of a regulatory agency.
Coming to that point is a much steeper climb for the Second Amendment community, and setting up assurances that the same rights will not be violated again with political ebb and flow is a challenge. If I were in charge of meeting that challenge head-on, hiring someone like Robert Leider might be at the top of my to-do list. He is now in a position to make a difference, not only in ongoing ATF litigation but also in future actions against those who remain in defiance of American gun rights. So, don’t perceive my reluctance to raise the roof negatively. Understand it as well-tempered optimism while we remind leaders of their commitments and the loyalty and reward that accompany kept promises.
I was not familiar with Leider till his appointment, he appears to be promising,
As President Reagan said “Trust, but verify”.
When Bondi was sworn into office one of the first things she did was terminate Pamela Hicks (the ATF chief counsel at the time).
Hicks was responsible for, essentially, the ‘murder’ of Bryan Malinowski for which there were no criminal charges, no arrest warrant or indications of arrest to take place, nor any actual evidence of wrong doing. All they had was was their own made up interpretation of what ‘in the business’ means and based upon that investigated and surveilled him and got a ‘fishing expedition’ search warrant without even a specific defined item or items they were looking for and just generally, basically, records of transactions. He was an innocent man, and Hicks created a ‘crime’ using an interpretation that even the congress members who sponsored the so called ‘bipartisan safer communities act’ with the ‘in the business’ thing in it said later was never intended.
And its not only that she was involved with. She OK’d the ATF basically terrorizing at gun point or with implied use of deadly force, to force FFL’s to surrender their license for simple clerical errors like a lower case hand written ‘a’ looking more like an ‘o’, and in some cases held them and their children or other family members at gun point while trying to force the ‘voluntary’ surrender of the FFL license. Then she also did the Manly raid, the ATF threatened to shoot his wife and kids – based upon the word of a ‘cultivated informant’ they knew was lying about Manley but Hicks still pushed forward to get a search warrant, so again a fully armed tac team raided and they destroyed his home interior and let their dogs defecate in the house and on the beds, flash banged them, and the search turned up nothing at all.
And there are hundreds of more cases of the terror and criminality of the ATF and Hicks. The only thing that has kept them from being prosecuted is the slim-est of excuses to be covered under the “qualified immunity” concept, and most of those excuses is based only upon the word of Hicks and the ATF agents involved .
Then Hicks was working in the background with anti-gun organizations for even more terror if Joe or Kamala got elected.
The reign of Biden tyranny needed to end. Yet the Democrats and left-winger anti-gun and Miner49er cheered on the terror and violence and death visited upon innocent American citizens by Bidens weaponized ATF, and tried to justify it with ‘semantics’ games and out of context interpretations and deceptive biased news-reports and postings on social media, and never shed a tear or concern citing basically how justified it was. But for some reason they cry big tears if an actual criminal illegal immigrant who has murdered and raped and preyed on children and human-trafficked is caught and deported or a terrorist is caught and deported.
The appointment appears solid, offering a moment of hope. As for laws and politics, there’s always another election every two years that offers traps of differing directions. That’s why it’s important not to treat voting as if throwing spit wads at the wall.
It did not take long for knee jerk so called defenders of the 2A to get impatient with Bondi and ready to form a lynchmob or treat her like a Tesla and watch her burn. Perhaps politically inept rambo wannabes should take a ticket and have a seat. It seems the same headline reading snot nosed whiners who were quick to hold hands with democRats and throw POTUS DJT under the bus following Vegas have not learn a damned thing.
It’s not only being impatient and acting like spoiled brats it is ungrateful that America just dodged a gun grabbing cackling bullet and a gasbag with a tampon up his behind. Bondi is what we have and instead of jumping to throw her under the bus certain thinned skinned people should mass message their members of congress with their needs, wants and complaints.
In the meantime try to take one of the below maniacs shooting. I heard showing them a good fun time will move them to supporting the 2A. And fun times instead of The Truth About Gun Control will be the death nail for Gun Control…Those who want to consume that fun turd sandwich can swallow it…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=7A3zBe1zWRg&feature=shared
The White House posted on X yesterday:
“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. 🇺🇸”
https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1902902359467995602
And Dan Bongino, FBI Deputy Director, paid a visit to ATF yesterday and posted on X:
“Paid a visit to the ATF today. It’s a new era — one where Americans will be kept safe and their Constitutional rights will be protected.”
https://x.com/FBIDDBongino/status/1902897279284977995
U.S. Attorney Michael Simpson’s opinion that suppressors are not covered by the 2A is consistent with the just released en banc opinion of the Ninth Circuit in Duncan v. Bonta concluding, unsurprisingly, that accessories are not “arms” and therefore not protected by the 2A. The Ninth en banc concluded on this basis that large capacity “ammunition feeding devices” (i.e., mags with 10+ capacity) are accessories, and therefore legally banned. It is a very long opinion which I have yet to read, so for now I have to question why, when a magazine is necessary to operate a semiautomatic firearm, a ten round mag is protected and a 10+ mag is not. Further, as the dissent (in a video dissent no less) concluded, if magazines are accessories, could it be possible to ban all magazines (and thereby ban all automatic or semiautomatic firearms? The State could not answer this question , and the majority did not address it. (As an aside, the en banc panel of the Ninth has an unblemished record (20+ cases) of upholding each and every firearm law enacted in California. )
A govt agency designed to take from the public cannot be effectively converted into an agency with a mission to assist the public. Taxes are taken from the public (which is the prime mission of ATF). Acting to protect the fundamental rights of the public is giving power to the public.
Tiger, stripes. . . . .
selling booze, tobacco, or guns without paying the government its tax might just get you killed
“selling booze, tobacco, or guns without paying the government its tax might just get you killed”
“It just goes to show ya’, if it’s not one thing, it’s another”.
– Roseanne Roseannadanna