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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
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Dems put rush order on Biden’s ATF pick in wake of Texas shooting

The federal gun enforcement agency has not had a permanent director since 2015.

WASHINGTON (CN) — President Joe Biden's nominee to champion the enforcement of U.S. gun laws faced a tense confirmation hearing Wednesday, less than 24 hours after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school.

The mass murder at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, brought the highest death toll of any mass shooting this year and the largest school shooting since the massacre nearly 10 years ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Lawmakers marked the grim distinction Wednesday at a hearing previously scheduled to consider Biden's appointment of Steven Dettelbach to serve as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Having failed to pass any firearm restrictions in the decade since 26 people, most of them children, were slaughtered at Sandy Hook, Democrats are under pressure to do so now in a 50-50 Senate where their defeat is all but certain.

“The pain that the Robb Elementary School community in Uvalde, Texas, is living through today is perhaps incomprehensible for those of us who have children, but it is predictable,” Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware said. "So, I’ll make a bold prediction: It will happen again and again until we collectively decide to find a path forward to responsibly address it."

Dettelbach spoke to the committee about his vow to focus on hate crimes if he is confirmed, recounting his personal experience as a Jewish man raising Jewish kids while witnessing attacks on schools, synagogues, mosques and churches.

The Tuesday shooting in Texas came just over a week after the country endured back-to-back racially motivated shootings in Buffalo, New York and Laguna Hills, California.

Dettelbach currently leading the white-collar investigations team at Baker Hostetler where he is a partner, but he previously spent a decade as a prosecutor, including as a U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, having secured a unanimous confirmation vote in 2009.

“When you become a prosecutor and you interact with victims and survivors who have experienced incredible loss, it becomes a part of you. And it never leaves you,” Dettelbach said during Wednesday’s hearing.

Eight former ATF directors and several former attorneys general from Republican and Democratic administrations have endorsed Dettelbach’s nomination, but his nomination to run ATF is already proving to be a hyper-partisan affair.

Republicans have been critical in particular of an assault weapons ban for which the Democratic Dettelbach advocated during a 2018 failed bid for Ohio attorney general. At Dettelbach's hearing on Wednesday, however, most Republican members of the committee were not in attendance.

Dettelbach was cautious when Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas asked him to define “assault weapons." Without offering a specific definition, Dettelbach vowed to adhere to existing law.

“I think, senator, what I told you, which is that you don’t want to be so narrow as to be meaningless and you don’t want to be so broad as to infringe on the rights of law-abiding Americans unnecessarily,” Dettelbach said.

Confirming any nominee to lead the ATF has been a notoriously difficult task, and the bureau has been without a permanent director for the past seven years.

Biden previously nominated David Chipman for the job. Despite his background as a former special agent, Chipman faced pushback from the gun lobby over his advocacy work with the Giffords Law Group, a gun-control group named for its founding member, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head at a campaign event and survived.

On top of leadership vacancies, the ATF suffers from a notorious lack of funding and resources. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat, noted that the federal law enforcement bureau has fewer agents than the Metropolitan Police has officers who serve the nation's capital. Law enforcement agencies such as the FBI have seen their budgets grown substantially over time, but funding at the ATF has barely kept up with inflation.

“God bless you for stepping up to lead an agency that hasn’t had a head for the longest time, that Donald Trump couldn't even get a head for because a very corporate, industrial, driven lobby is dictating policy here — more than the good conscience of folks,” Booker said, alluding to the influence on Washington wielded by the National Rifle Association.

“We are once again sacrificing our children on the altar of inaction,” Booker said of Congress’ failure to install a permanent ATF leader and further fund the agency.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who is Republican, accused “the Left” of politicizing the Uvalde attack to advance gun-control legislation. 

“Every time one of these tragedies occurs, I think we, for far too long, have failed to look back at the root causes of rampage violence — questions involving things like fatherlessness, the breakdown of families, isolation from civil society or the glorification of violence,” Lee said.

Pushback on gun control has been a common story for Biden, who has advocated for universal background checks but whose advocacy has been met with gridlock in the tightly divided Senate. The president has used his executive power to pass smaller-scale reforms, one of which targeted the absence of serial numbers on so-called ghost guns that consumers can build themselves as part of do-it-yourself kits sold over the internet. To pass more sweeping gun-control reform, however, Congress is needed. 

Dettelbach's confirmation hinges on all Senate Democrats backing his confirmation — a prospect that is far from assured. Montana Senator John Tester has long opposed the revival of an assault-weapons ban, and Tester and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin were both skeptical about Chipman, Biden’s previous nominee.

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