Joe Biden is less than three weeks away from retiring as arguably the worst president of the modern era. Joining him at the exits will be his ATF director, Steven Dettelbach, who announced his own resignation, effective Jan. 18. Law-abiding gun owners and firearm businesses are breathing a sigh of relief that they will no longer be in the crosshairs of the Biden-Harris administration’s “whole of government approach” to Second Amendment suppression. Yet the ATF’s recent sacking of a Second Amendment activist’s family home shows an embittered, defeated, and corrupted anti-gun regime getting in its final licks on the way out the door.
The story will sound all too familiar to those acquainted with ATF’s history of overbearing brutishness against peaceful American families.
Mark “Choppa” Manley is a family man, gun collector, Second Amendment activist, and an intervention specialist for his local public school district. Intervention specialists work with students experiencing barriers to academic success by assessing needs, delivering targeted instruction, and collaborating with others to ensure comprehensive support. Those skills may have saved his and his family members’ lives when ATF agents launched a predawn, SWAT-style raid against their Baltimore home on Nov. 21 of last year.
The justification for the raid, and the necessity of ATF’s heavy-handed tactics against the non-resisting couple and their underage children, remain unexplained. Manley himself believes his pro-gun outreach to the Black community (America’s fastest-growing segment of new gun owners) may have made him a target.
As Manley explained to investigative journalist Lee Williams, the morning started out as most of the family’s working days do, as he and his wife, also a school teacher, awoke early. Manley’s wife, who requested that her name be withheld for privacy reasons, went down to the kitchen shortly after 4:00 a.m. to make coffee. It was there she noticed people moving toward the home, leading her to shout a warning to her husband.
Manley looked out the window and saw agents with long guns converging on the home in a tactical formation. Security cameras showed a similar scene at the rear of the house.
Manley was able to awaken his two daughters (aged 17 and 13), but his 15-year-old son remained in his basement bedroom.
He continued:
I looked out the window again and could tell they were going to bust down our door. … I yelled ‘Hello! We are up here.’ All of a sudden, a bomb went off. My wife screamed. She followed right behind me on our way out, but she was disoriented. She was in pure shock.
Security camera footage captured what happened next, as the terrorized couple and their daughters, thinly clad in bedclothes, came out of the front door into the 20 degree morning air with their hands above their heads. Despite the fact that they were all clearly unarmed, the agents kept their rifles trained on them at point blank distances. Manley yelled at the agents that they were pointing rifles at his daughters, knowing from his own training and experience the mortal peril this posed to them.
Manley and his 17-year-old daughter were handcuffed, and his wife and children were bundled into the back of a police van in the freezing cold. His wife questioned why the handcuffs were necessary, when Manley had been peaceful and compliant.
The agents then turned their attention to Manley’s 15-year-old son, who was still in his bedroom. Manley told Williams agents deployed a flashbang grenade, and 14 of them rushed the boy with their guns drawn, breaking through the glass door to his room and threatening to shoot him. When they emerged with his son some 30 minutes later, Manley spoke of his relief at seeing him alive.
The family was brought back inside while agents and K9s ransacked the home for hours. Manley recounted to Williams that the police dogs “defecated everywhere, even on my daughter’s bed.”
Agents also threatened to blow up Manley locked gun safe, but he voluntarily opened it for them, know he had nothing to hide.
Describing the moment to Williams, Manley said:
They were all standing around waiting and hoping … This was their moment, they thought. They started pulling out rifles and shotguns, but everything was registered and Maryland-compliant. ‘We got nothing here,’ one of them said.
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.
For Mark “Choppa” Manley, however, the aftermath of the experience lingers. “They put me in the worst position as the man of the house,” he told Williams. “It was all just horrific, man.”
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