Questions Still Raised Over ATF Raid With No Answers In Sight

Late last month, I wrote about a gun rights advocate who was raided by the ATF. It was a harrowing ordeal for the whole family as agents pointed guns at Mark “Choppa” Manley’s loved ones. He argues that it was an intimidation tactic at the time, and while I couldn’t rule it out, there was a part of me that wondered if we’d see anything else.

By Tom Knighton for Bearing Arms

Manley was, of course, preparing for that. He was fundraising for a legal defense because the last thing he needed to do was to just assume everything was fine, and then get bankrupted defending himself.

Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, the process itself can be the punishment.

I wrote that story on December 26th.

Two weeks later, there are still questions left unanswered.

All of Manley’s 70 plus firearms were unerringly compliant with federal law and the strict firearms laws of Maryland.

When all was said and done, no arrests were made and no firearms or ammunition were seized. The only item taken was Manley’s cell phone.

The family’s home, however, was left in a shambles: front and rear doors shattered, windows broken, floors ruined from flashbang grenades, and dog excrement the family was left to clean up themselves.

Manley told Williams they had only lived in the house for three months when the raid occurred.

To date, the ATF has not issued an explanation for why the raid was conducted, much less publicly apologized for terrorizing the family. Mrs. Manley said the search warrant indicated her husband was a felon in possession of firearms. Manley, however, said he does not have a felony record, he does not sell guns, he does not have any machine guns, and he is still in the dark as to why he was targeted. “To this day we just don’t know,” he told Williams.

If, however, the government truly believed Manley was a felon (hardly a difficult matter for a federal law enforcement agency to investigate and substantiate), he presumably would have been arrested the moment he disclosed his possession of firearms to the agents. That obviously did not happen.

Did the government conduct its due diligence before conducting the raid? What evidence supposedly substantiated the sworn application for the raid? So far, ATF officials have had nothing to say on their own behalf.

The ATF’s actions extracted a heavy toll on the Manley family, who have been left with home repairs, legal bills, and the cost of therapy for their traumatized kids. A Go Fund Me page has been established to provide the family support and to help restore a sense of normalcy to their lives.

Honestly, this should be troubling for each and every one of us.

As it stands, many people don’t talk about even owning firearms. There’s the old “I lost all my guns in a tragic boating accident” bit that some people think is amusing, some are annoyed by, and no one is fooled by. There are others who simply don’t say anything at all about guns. They support the right to keep and bear arms, but they’re silent, in part because they don’t want anyone to know they have guns.

I can’t help but think this is by design.

Manley’s ordeal may well have been nothing more than the intimidation tactic he believes it to be. The fact that the only thing they took was his cell phone–which is, coincidentally, the most inconvenient thing they could take–makes it pretty clear that whatever gun crime they claimed they suspected him of, he didn’t do.

But the raid itself may make some people even less likely to even acknowledge they have guns.

That creates more isolation, particularly when talking about gun rights as a whole. If we can’t talk and advocate for what we believe, then it becomes easier to convince people there are no arguments against gun control.

And it’s going to be hard to convince me that there’s absolutely no way the Biden administration’s ATF wouldn’t do any such thing.

As things currently stand, there aren’t any answers coming about what happened, why Manley was targeted, why the raid continued as it did after it became clear that Manley and his family both knew agents were there and expressed their willingness to cooperate. These are questions that need to be answered, and my hope is that this new Congress can be pressured into looking into this and ATF officials can be forced to answer for what happened.

Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. He also puts out a daily newsletter of non-Second Amendment stories at https://tomknighton.substack.com/

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