If you ever wondered what happens when a career ATF bureaucrat lands a soft seat at Everytown, here’s your answer. Marianna Mitchem left ATF in May 2025 and almost immediately surfaced at Everytown for Gun Safety. And she didn’t waste time easing into the role. According to one former ATF colleague, she reached out after leaving and tried to figure out how to target Glock and Glock-style pistols. That alone tells you what direction she was heading.
Mitchem just helped roll out a long report titled The Supply Side of Violence How Gun Dealers Fuel Firearm Trafficking. It reads like someone trying to win an award for excess verbiage. The message, though, is simple. The report blames gun dealers for criminal violence and treats FFLs as the core problem rather than the criminals pulling the triggers.
Her coauthors, Nick Suplina and Chelsea Parsons, both come from the New York Attorney General’s Office and now sit comfortably at Everytown. Together, the trio spent ample time taking shots at President Donald Trump’s support for gun rights while painting the ATF under President Joe Biden as a model crime-fighting operation.
What doesn’t appear anywhere in their narrative are the ATF’s own high-profile failures under Biden, including the killing of Bryan Malinowski and the fabricated case that left Patrick Tate Adamiak serving 20 years on false charges. Those facts don’t fit the script, so they’re ignored.
Instead, the authors offer a long list of heavy-handed state requirements that would eliminate most gun dealers. They call it filling a federal void. In reality, it reads like a roadmap to wiping out the retail gun market.
Here is their wish list straight from the report:
- State licensing stacked on top of federal FFL requirements
- Extensive physical security mandates for every shop
- Yearly background checks and trafficking training for all employees
- Constant state or local inspections
- Mandatory reporting of all gun sales plus complete electronic access to dealer records
- Automatic suspensions and revocations for a wide range of infractions
- Forced handouts on storage suicide and so-called risks of gun ownership
- Civil liability if a firearm from a dealer is ever misused
- Annual trace-data reporting targeting dealers by name
Anyone who’s spent time in a gun shop or on a firing line can see what this really is. None of this stops criminals. It stops dealers. If you can’t ban guns directly, make it impossible for lawful sellers to stay in business.
Mitchem’s ATF background says even more
Mitchem joined ATF in 2005 as an Industry Operations Investigator, doing paperwork reviews, inventory checks, and compliance visits. Not enforcement. She moved quickly through management, becoming a field supervisor in 2011, running Phoenix Industry Operations by 2014, deputy chief of Field Management Staff in 2017, and chief the following year.
By 2019, she was deputy chief of staff. In 2020, she became chief of the Firearms and Explosives Industry Division. Her last post, beginning in 2024, was Associate Assistant Director of Field Operations.
People who worked with her described her as sharp but firmly anti-gun. When Joe Biden appointed Steve Dettelbach to run ATF, Mitchem got more authority. One former ATF official flat-out called her Dettelbach’s puppet. She became the driving force behind ATF’s frame or receiver rule and the push against so-called ghost guns.
That ghost gun program turned into a running joke inside the agency. If officers couldn’t quickly find a serial number, the firearm went straight onto the ghost gun list. No verification. No confirmation. That tanked the reliability of the database, but it didn’t stop the administration from using it as a talking point.
Our Take
This report isn’t about stopping criminals. It’s about kneecapping the lawful gun market by burying FFLs under so many state mandates that most couldn’t survive a single year. It’s the same strategy we’ve seen before: weaponize regulation when you can’t win the constitutional argument.
Gun dealers aren’t the problem. Criminals are. But Everytown and its newest ATF import would rather focus on wiping out the legal supply chain than admit that targeting lawful gun owners and dealers does nothing to reduce crime.
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