Texas shooting: Uvalde massacre raises the stakes for hearings on Biden’s pick to run the ATF

Children get on a school bus as law enforcement personnel guard the scene of a suspected shooting near Robb Elementary School in Uvald. The carnage began with the 18-year-old suspect, identified as Salvador Ramos, shooting his own grandmother, who survived, authorities said. (Source: Reuters)

Glenn Thrush and Katie Benner

WASHINGTON — White House officials knew the confirmation hearings for President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would be a make-or-break moment for his stalled agenda on gun control.

Then, less than 24 hours before the nominee, Steven M Dettelbach, was set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, an 18-year-old man wielded a handgun, and possibly a rifle, to kill 19 children, a teacher and another adult at a school in Uvalde, Texas, the authorities said.

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What that means for the confirmation process, at a time when mass shootings emerge and recede quickly in the public consciousness, is uncertain.

But the massacre has raised the stakes of the fast-tracked hearing, and will cast into even starker relief the differences between Dettelbach, a mainstream Democrat who supports his party’s call for renewal of an assault-weapons ban, and Republicans who have portrayed him as a threat to Second Amendment rights.

“I think this is going to change the dynamics of the hearing — after Buffalo and Uvalde,” said Peter Ambler, the executive director of the gun control group founded by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, referring to the racist shooting more than a week ago in Buffalo, New York, that left 10 dead.

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“Confirming a permanent ATF director is the absolutely least they can do, and they needed to have done it yesterday,” Ambler said Tuesday.

Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat who favours stringent gun control, wrote on Twitter late Monday that the “U.S. Senate needs to confirm Steve Dettelbach without delay.” The confirmation of Dettelbach, who has also pushed for a crackdown on homemade firearms known as “ghost guns,” would keep weapons from ending up in the “wrong hands,” Murphy added.

Installing a new ATF director is one of the few consequential moves Biden’s administration can still make. The two major policy changes Biden espoused during the 2020 campaign — reviving an assault-weapons ban that expired in 2004 and imposing universal background checks on gun buyers — have been blocked by Senate Republicans.

A year ago, the White House tapped David Chipman, a pugnacious opponent of the gun lobby, to run the ATF. But administration officials failed to protect Chipman from a fierce backlash. By September, they were forced to withdraw his nomination.

Dettelbach is much more confirmation-friendly: He is upbeat, avoids bombastic talk, and has earned dozens of endorsements from law enforcement.

Yet he still faces the narrowest of paths to confirmation.

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Republican opposition is likely to be unanimous, and even a single Democratic defection will doom his prospects. How he performs at his confirmation hearing Wednesday — especially when grilled over his support for an assault-weapons ban — will determine whether the ATF gets its first confirmed director in seven years.

“I’ve been talking to a number of Democrats who say how favourably impressed they have been with him, how favourably toward him they feel, but they want to watch the hearings just to make sure,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, a friend of Dettelbach’s who has been working colleagues on his behalf.

“I’m pretty certain we’re going to confirm him,” he added.

Compared with Chipman, Dettelbach has made few policy pronouncements on guns, with one significant exception: He supported the renewal of the federal assault-weapons ban during an unsuccessful campaign for Ohio attorney general in 2018.

Several Senate Democrats oppose reinstating a ban, and that poses the greatest threat to Dettelbach’s confirmation. One of them is Sen. Jon Tester of Montana.

Dettelbach met with Tester this month, and the senator walked away impressed with his credentials, and undecided about his own vote, a spokesperson said. Dettelbach’s conversations with Sens. Angus King, I-Maine, and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., have resulted in the same outcomes.

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