Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Shannon Waedell-Collins pays her respects at a memorial to the victims of the Tops supermarket massacre, Buffalo, New York, May 18, 2022.
Thoughts and prayers are raining down on Buffalo like the bullets that massacred ten people who were food shopping last Saturday. In response to every horrific mass shooting, conservatives and Second Amendment enthusiasts point out: If a good guy with a gun had been around during any one of the dozens of mass shootings that have taken place in recent times, more of the victims would be alive today. Gun rights proponents use this rationale to support open-carry laws and other liberalization measures, saying that such laws would control other crimes committed with guns, from home invasions to muggings.
But if a good guy with a gun is the answer to gun violence, then why has the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) relied on interim directors for nearly a decade? Why is the nomination of President’s Biden’s second candidate to direct the bureau still so controversial? And why does an American president have resort to administrative state decision-making to stem the proliferation of weapons that many soldiers and veterans say should not be in civilian hands?
If more good guys with guns is the answer, and presumably ATF has more than a few, then Steve Dettelbach, the former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, should be uncontroversial. While Democrats only need 50 votes to confirm agency nominees, the Biden administration’s route through Republican intransigence has been not to just select an eminently qualified individual, but to nominate someone who has already secured bipartisan backing for a federal position requiring Senate confirmation—a lesson learned from the Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation proceedings. Dettelbach earned unanimous support to become U.S. attorney in 2009.
According to Lindsay Nichols, federal policy director for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a national advocacy group, the ATF has not been able to effectively carry out its regulatory functions, such as monitoring background checks or assuring that guns are not diverted into illegal commerce and trafficking, “because of a lack of resources, a lack of leadership, and a lack of will.”
Dettelbach has multi-jurisdictional expertise on violent crime, especially domestic terrorism and gang-related crimes. He has a track record of working with federal, state, and local law enforcement to fight violent crime and combat domestic violent extremism and religious violence, including through partnerships with the ATF to prosecute complex cases and investigate violent criminal gangs. And he has worked closely with local law enforcement officials and community leaders nationwide.
Moreover, Dettelbach knows how to handle complex cases involving politics, intense media scrutiny, and violence of the kind perpetuated by white extremists, according to Nichols. He has prosecuted two important cases: one involving a white supremacist who set fire to the prominent African American First Azusa Apostolic Faith Church in Conneaut, Ohio, and another involving a Marine veteran who set fire to the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo. “That’s the work that the [ATF] should be doing and one of the reasons we need an ATF director,” Nichols says.
State and local law enforcement depend on ATF to investigate crimes like the Buffalo massacre and trace the guns used in these crimes. Localities do not have the budgets, people, technology, or legal authority to do so. Federal law, for example, requires the gun industry to reply to requests from ATF regarding tracing guns, “putting ATF in a unique position,” according to Nichols.
Last month, President Biden announced the Dettelbach nomination at the same time as the Justice Department’s final rule on ghost guns. Ghost guns cannot be traced but can be made by anyone without passing a background check, using kits ordered online or at home with 3D printers. In doing so, the president sent a signal of the importance of having a permanent leader installed at a bureau that is facing multiple challenges. In 2021, about 20,000 ghost guns were reported to ATF as having been recovered by law enforcement agencies, a tenfold increase since 2016, according to a White House fact sheet.
Concurrent with the rise in violent crime, especially hate crimes, the increasing sophistication of a technology that allows people to evade the existing gun laws means the agency has reached a pivotal juncture. “ATF is going to have to undertake a whole new form of investigation and prosecution that it hasn’t done before, and prioritize accordingly,” Nichols says.
In 2006, the NRA lobbied Congress to enact a law requiring Senate confirmation for the ATF nominee.
But the Jackson standard may not help Dettelbach. With Congress set on a policy of de facto gun proliferation rather than control, one might conclude that he is not their man. The Biden administration is not the first to run into the brick wall that is the Senate on ATF leadership. The ATF director was once a direct presidential appointment. In 2006, however, the NRA successfully lobbied Congress to enact a law requiring Senate confirmation for the ATF nominee, giving gun rights advocates a means to control who ends up in the bureau’s top slot—if anyone ends up in the slot at all.
President Obama is the only president to have his nominee, B. Todd Jones, installed at the agency since the 2006 change. He retired in 2015, the last year that the agency had a permanent director. President Trump could not find a person to satisfy the far right. His choice to head the agency, Chuck Canterbury, a former national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, refused to disclose his views on background checks and other gun rights litmus-test issues, and he ran afoul of far-right Senate Republicans like Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). Trump withdrew his nomination.
Despite Democratic claims to support gun safety laws and the ability to confirm nominees with only Democratic votes, Biden’s first nominee, David Chipman, was forced to withdraw. A Senate Judiciary Committee hearing has not yet been scheduled. Dettelbach has earned the support of over 100 mayors from both major parties.
With Biden reaching the limits of what a president can do absent healthier majorities in Congress, the midterm elections will indicate where the appetite for stronger background checks and other gun control initiatives goes. But in early May, when Monmouth University pollsters asked 807 adults to rank six policy issue areas, gun control came in number five behind the economy, abortion, health care, and immigration.
The president had to make the pilgrimage to the latest massacre site, as his predecessors have done for years. But the gesture, though undoubtedly genuine, is so much performance art in a country where gun violence is endemic, and gun proliferation rather than control the strategy of choice. Although many members of Congress support stronger gun control measures, there are just as many lawmakers who are content to offer “thoughts and prayers” after these American massacres.
As for a good guy with a gun? “Simply having guns is not necessarily going to help and unqualified civilians are even less likely to help,” Nichols notes. “They don’t receive any training. They may misjudge the situation. They’re not law enforcement officers.”
At the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, there was a good guy with a gun with all the training that one could require. Aaron Salter Jr., a retired 30-year veteran of the Buffalo Police Department, worked as a security guard at the market. “He’s a true hero,” Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said earlier this week. “There could have been more victims if not for his actions.” Salter fired on the alleged assailant, Payton Gendron. He wore body armor; Salter did not. The veteran officer died of his wounds. He was 55.
