With Kash Patel running the ATF now, there’s been a lot of excitement. There have also been a ton of takes from different people about what may happen or what they’d like to see happen.

Patel, after all, is pretty pro-gun and spoke at GOALs, the GOA’s conference that took place last year. He espoused everything you could possibly want in an ATF director, including a real belief in the Second Amendment. No, “I support the Second Amendment but…” rhetoric, that’s for sure.

But the folks over at Reason tend to think a little differently than many others who support gun rights. They ask whether Patel can really rein in the excesses of the ATF and what are some of the upsides and downsides of consolidating it with the FBI.

By appointing FBI Director Kash Patel as acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), President Donald Trump took a step towards reining in a federal agency justifiably viewed by many as a threat to self-defense rights. He also signaled that he may consolidate government bodies that overlap in their responsibilities. Fans of big government and opponents of privately owned firearms won’t like the move, but the idea of combining the agencies is hardly unprecedented. After all, President Bill Clinton had the same idea three decades ago.

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The announcement of Patel’s new role at the ATF came after the anti-gun Brady Campaign had already denounced Patel’s confirmation by the Senate as FBI director, calling him a “known gun rights extremist and conspiracy theorist.” The group also wasn’t happy when Attorney General Pam Bondi fired former ATF Chief Counsel Pamela Hicks for “targeting gun owners.” It’s fair to assume the Brady Campaign is equally displeased with Patel’s new job leading the ATF along with the FBI.

ATF’s History of Incompetence and Abuse

But it’s impossible to credibly argue that the ATF doesn’t need a shakeup. After all, this is a federal agency that ran guns to criminal gangs in Mexico as part of a bizarre and failed “investigation,” manipulated mentally disabled people into participating in sting operations—and then arrested them, lost thousands of guns and gun parts, killed people over paperwork violations, and unilaterally reinterpreted laws to create new felonies out of thin air (which means more cause for sketchy investigations and stings). The federal police agency obsessively focused on firearms has long seemed determined to guarantee itself work by finding ever more things to police.

But what about putting the same person in charge of both the ATF and the FBI? How does that make sense?

Well, there’s a lot of overlap in the responsibilities of federal agencies. During the ATF’s “Operation Fast and Furious” gunrunning escapade in Mexico, it coordinated—badly—with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). During its 2012 investigation of that fiasco, the Justice Department Inspector General “conducted interviews with more than 130 persons currently or previously employed by the Department, ATF, the DEA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)” on its way to identifying “a series of misguided strategies, tactics, errors in judgment, and management failures that permeated ATF Headquarters and the Phoenix Field Division.”

Reason’s J.D. Tuccille also argues that if the ATF were to merge with the FBI, agents might not be so single-minded in the pursuit of gun law violations that they’re willing to manufacture. Finding black-market dealers is difficult, but jamming up people with paperwork errors is a lot easier, and it can make for arrests just the same.

So, to justify their existence, they go after the lower-hanging fruit.

If they were to merge with the FBI–and there’s already overlap other than what Tuccille notes above, considering who actually runs NICS–then that pressure would be off. There would be enough other crimes to be investigated that there wouldn’t be this need to find something, anything, that can lead to a gun arrest.

But there’s a potential downside. With the FBI and ATF merged, it’s entirely possible to get “a supercharged federal enforcement agency with all the hostility to civil liberties its old components embodied when separate, but now with lots more clout.”

“But Kash wouldn’t allow that,” some might say, and I tend to agree. I think Kash Patel wouldn’t let that happen under his watch.

The problem isn’t Patel, but the next guy.

If the capability is there to become something like this, it’ll likely always be there unless everything is done just right. Tuccille talks primarily about the merger itself being critical, and I agree, but I think there is a possibility that it could be done in such a manner that it looks fine for the first few years, then the problems start to show.

Yet the problem also lies in the fact that nothing is static in government. Any federal agency requires constant watching to make sure they don’t overstep their mandated authority, and that hasn’t happened with anyone. Unless that’s fixed, I’m not sure you could handle any such merger in a way that would prevent the reformed agency from pulling some of the same shenanigans it did as separate agencies.

As for the more day-to-day issues with the ATF, I don’t think there’s an issue in fixing those, at least under Patel’s tenure. The question is whether it can be done in a way that it can’t go backward.