Less than 24 hours after the deadliest mass shooting at an elementary school in nearly a decade, President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the government agency responsible for regulating firearms appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, representing perhaps the administration’s best remaining chance to further its goals on gun control.
But the confirmation hearing of Steve Dettelbach to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives revealed that even in the shadow of a massacre that claimed the lives of 19 young children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, the unified Republican opposition to firearm restrictions that sank the previous nominee has not abated.
“You've called for every type of gun control,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) told Dettelbach at the top of his hearing on Wednesday morning, before requesting that he disavow the actions of gun control groups who “play on the emotions of those whose lives have been ripped apart by a tragic shooting.”
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“It’s very telling that you’ve been nominated to lead the ATF and you don’t have a definition of an assault weapon,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said. “There is really no such thing as assault weapons.”
Although the tone of hearing was markedly different from that of David Chipman, a longtime former ATF agent whose nomination was pulled before he was even allowed to come up for a vote, Republicans in the hearing remained openly hostile to Dettelbach’s nomination to be the first confirmed head of the ATF in seven years.
Much of the Republican questioning involved why firearms prosecutions had dropped while Dettelbach served as the U.S Attorney in Ohio, though multiple members of the committee’s minority attempted to link Dettelbach to Chipman’s own nomination.
Chipman’s nomination failed after two conservative Democrats—Sens. Joe Manchin of Wyoming and Jon Tester of Montana—joined Republicans in opposing him over past support for an assault weapons ban and universal background checks for firearms purchases. Both, Republicans pointed out in Wednesday’s hearing, are issues that Dettelbach supported during his attempted run for Ohio attorney general four years ago.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the committee’s ranking member, asked Dettelbach to outline which of Chipman’s beliefs on firearm regulations that he didn’t support, as well as whether he had familiarized himself with “the concerns that the government raised” about Chipman’s past work on gun reform.
Democrats, meanwhile, appeared largely embittered by the lack of action that the committee on which they sat had done little to respond to the Uvalde tragedy and others like it beyond what Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) called “empty thoughts and prayers.”
“All we have done, time and time again, is to try to console the victims of these senseless tragedies and wait for the next inevitable attack,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). She noted that before Chipman’s own confirmation hearing, a mass shooter in her home state killed nine people in a trainyard. “And we know that it will come,” she said.
Dettelbach’s potential confirmation to lead the ATF, which has not had a director since the Obama administration, comes as the Biden administration is under mounting pressure from Democrats to meaningfully address the issue of gun violence in the United States. The massacre in Uvalde—in which an 18-year-old gunman shot and killed 19 children in a fourth-grade classroom, as well as two teachers—have evoked memories of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the deadliest elementary school shooting in U.S. history.
Biden, speaking from the White House on Tuesday evening, called on the Senate to “stand up to the gun lobby” by passing “commonsense gun laws.”
“I am sick and tired,” Biden said. “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen? Where in God’s name is our backbone?”
But with legislative priorities on gun control doomed—Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday said he wouldn’t even bother holding a so-called “accountability vote” on background checks—and the administration having already exhausted most of the tools available through executive orders and proposed regulatory changes, a new head of the ATF may be one of Biden’s only achievable goals.
The ATF is the government’s chief agency for enforcing laws regulating firearms. As chief, Dettelbach would be in a position to direct investigations of gun crimes ranging from mass shootings like those in Uvalde and Newtown to illegal gun sales and trafficking. Although the two Democrats who sank Chipman’s nomination have not yet pledged to support Dettelbach, he is seen as more likely to be confirmed.
Dettelbach acknowledged the emotional nature of Wednesday’s hearing, telling the committee’s members that he had hugged his children tighter at the end of the previous day, but vowed that politics would not influence his work at ATF.
“Politics have absolutely no place in law enforcement. They have no place in an ATF director and I don’t view this as a Democrat or Republican issue,” Dettelbach said. “I’d use it as an opportunity to try to work together to make things better.”
