Jae C. Hong/AP Photo
Crosses bearing the names of Tuesday’s shooting victims stand outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, May 26, 2022.
On Wednesday, an Associated Press investigative team reported that Russia has attacked more than 1,000 schools, destroying 95. One Kyiv school had been converted into a bomb shelter by a teacher: “As she lay buried under the rubble, her legs broken and eyes blinded by blood and thick clouds of dust, all Inna Levchenko could hear was screams. It was 12:15 p.m. on March 3, and moments earlier a blast had pulverized the school where she’d taught for 30 years … They painted the word ‘children’ in big, bold letters on the windows, hoping that Russian forces would see it and spare them. The bombs fell anyway.”
Thousands of miles to the west, the words “Robb Elementary School – Bienvenidos” appear in big bold letters on a purpose-built brick wall on a school lawn in Uvalde, Texas. The bullets flew anyway.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky conveyed his condolences.
The day after forensic experts began swabbing Uvalde parents for DNA samples to match to pieces of their children’s bodies, the Senate Judiciary Committee sat in comfortable chairs to consider the nomination of Steve Dettelbach to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The Uvalde massacre has unleashed all the familiar set pieces in the only country in the world that tolerates war-zone-level violence in peacetime. Outraged Democrats erupted and Republicans offered refreshed versions of old shibboleths that added up to the same old thing: In the service of championing law enforcement over gun regulation, Senate Republicans are ready and willing to scuttle the Dettelbach nomination.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) took the hypocrisy of American gun rights in a “school zone” and lined it up with Russian aggression and atrocities in a “war zone.” “The kind of weapons are being used by the Russians in Ukraine have no place in a school,” he said. “It’s not the time to blame the victims, it is time to blame those who sell weapons of war this way.” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) skirted over blood and carnage to grasp at the red herrings of “fatherlessness,” “breakdown of families,” and “glorification of violence”—issues that the GOP excels in doing nothing about.
In this “we’ve got to do something” environment, background checks skirt the surface of bold action. For the moment, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has set aside proposals requiring criminal background checks for online and gun show purchases and establishing longer waiting periods for people who may be flagged by these checks. Both measures have passed the House only to flounder in the upper chamber. Instead, he wants to chance a bipartisan deal.
But the serious problems that have stacked up for the next ATF director, if ATF ever gets one, transcend reactive deal-making. Ghost gun proliferation, the “iron pipeline” sending guns to Northern states with at least somewhat strict gun laws from lightly regulated states in the Southern tier of the country, and straw purchases of guns are all issues that defy background checks and red-flag laws.
Nor has ATF’s budget and staffing kept pace with other federal law enforcement agencies’. The agency is smaller than some police departments, which inhibits its ability to carry out investigations and inspections. “The ATF literally has fewer special agents than the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police has sworn officers; they have 760 ATF investigators who are responsible for 130,000 federal firearm licensees,” said Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ). Then there are lesser-known statutory restrictions that also hinder the ATF’s ability to investigate crimes.
The NRA does not want a permanent ATF director any more than it wants universal background checks, and it will spend millions to keep its senators in line.
The ATF’s National Tracing Center, the country’s only crime gun tracing facility, receives and stores firearm disposition records of federal firearms licensees that go out of business. Federal law requires ATF to process and maintain these “out-of-business records” for the purpose of tracing guns used in crimes that are recovered by law enforcement for criminal investigations.
The bureau currently receives an average of six million to eight million records each month. “People should go look at the warehouses full of paper records, my God,” said Sen. Leahy.
However, under federal law, the bureau cannot create a searchable database for these records—the law states that a searchable database or registry of gun owners may not be created.
When ATF receives paper records from licensees, they are converted to a nonsearchable electronic format. If they arrive in a searchable format, the search function must be disabled; that is, any searchable records received are converted to a nonsearchable format to be consistent with the format of paper record processing.
For example, if a serial number trace requires expedited emergency action, known as an urgent trace, ATF employees must visually scan the documents. The firearm is traced in the same way as a routine trace request, but ATF tracers expedite the process: The goal for completing an urgent trace is 24 hours, but often urgent traces are completed within hours or minutes.
Like most Biden nominees hoping to survive Republican obstructionist tactics, Dettelbach was affable but guarded in his answers. Asked “what is an assault weapon?”—the ATF version of the “what is a woman?” trap that Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson avoided—Dettelbach responded, “Defining that term would only be for Congress, if it chooses to take that up, to do.”
Republican aversion to federal regulation spells trouble for Dettelbach, as it would for any nominee with on-point regulatory sensibilities. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) expressed concern that the Biden administration is “responding to [gun control advocates’] demands to focus on the ATF’s regulatory responsibilities at the expense of law enforcement duties,” another example of the GOP’s complete abandonment of bipartisan solution-seeking. Even President Trump failed to get his choice for ATF director through the requisite NRA purity tests. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) noted that at a White House meeting after the Parkland massacre, Trump mentioned multiple times that he wanted to get universal background checks done. “Then the next day,” Klobuchar said, “he met with the NRA, and he changed his tune.”
During his Wednesday national address, President Biden asked when Americans would stand up to the gun lobbies, but those lobbies still have huge clout on Capitol Hill. Fortune magazine reported that in 2021, gun rights groups spent nearly $16 million on lobbying efforts (compared to gun control advocates’ nearly $3 million) a record and the most funds expended since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre a decade ago.
The NRA does not want a permanent ATF director any more than it wants universal background checks, and it will spend millions to keep its senators in line. Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, whose father was murdered in Lebanon in 1984, said it best: “We are being held hostage by 50 senators in Washington who refused to even put [a background checks bill] to a vote despite what we the American people want. Because they want to hold on to their own power.”
Whether or not Steve Dettelbach gets confirmed may depend on whether another massacre occurs before the vote. More killings and even the vaunted Republican Party discipline may not be able to withstand a fresh crescendo of outrage that outs their culture war claims to be “saving children” as the most cynical of lies.
