The Senate did something highly unusual on Wednesday: It voted to confirm someone to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, better known as ATF.
For many years, nearly every Senate Republicans fought tooth and nail to reject all ATF nominees, including Donald Trump’s in his first term, because GOP senators believed it would help undermine enforcement of federal gun laws. As a result, over the last couple of decades, only two nominees have been confirmed by the Senate to lead the agency.
This week, Robert Cekada became the third, following a 59-39 vote on the Senate floor. He’s the first ATF nominee to ever be confirmed with zero Republican opposition.
There’s no great mystery as to why: GOP lawmakers apparently aren’t overly concerned about the Trump administration enforcing gun policies too aggressively. On the contrary, right about the time the Senate confirmed Cekada, the Trump administration announced a sweeping rollback of gun safeguards. The New York Times reported:
The changes include rescinding a 2024 regulation from the Biden administration that sought to end what gun control advocates call the “gun show loophole.” That exemption allowed unlicensed dealers to sell firearms without performing a background check to see if the prospective buyer was prohibited by law from owning a gun.
The administration also plans to rescind a 2023 rule that restricted pistol braces, an attachment that enables the shooter to hold the weapon against their shoulder like a rifle.
Among other things, the timing was striking. Four days earlier, a Secret Service agent was shot at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. That same evening, there were two university-area shootings, which came just days after a mass shooting in Louisiana, which came just days after a different mass shooting in Louisiana, which coincided with a mass shooting in North Carolina.
Team Trump saw this and decided it was time for a response — in the form of scrapping policies designed to prevent gun violence.
It was the latest in a series of similar steps. A few months ago, for example, Trump’s Justice Department announced it would no longer enforce a federal ban on mailing handguns through the U.S. Postal Service, which was first approved 99 years ago.
Months earlier, The New York Times reported that Trump’s DOJ had also decided to slash the number of inspectors who monitor federally licensed gun dealers by two-thirds, “sharply limiting the government’s already crimped capacity to identify businesses that sell guns to criminals.”
The month before that, the Trump administration decided it would permit the sale of “forced reset triggers,” which can turn semiautomatic weapons into guns that can fire more bullets, more quickly and easily. (Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi said the move would “enhance public safety,” which seemed to turn reality on its head.)
Alas, we can keep going. After the 2022 massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, there was bipartisan support for significant new investments in improving mental health support for students as part of an effort to lessen the likelihood of future mass shootings. The Trump administration, however, decided to block $1 billion in grants for student mental health programs, concluding the programs to reduce gun violence in schools were no longer in “the best interest of the federal government.”
A week before these revelations came to light, The Washington Post reported that Trump’s DOJ had canceled hundreds of grants to community organizations and local governments, “including funding for gun-violence prevention programs.”
When thinking about the differences between the president’s first term and his second, this issue is high on the list. As I noted in my first book (see Chapter 8), it was in the wake of a school shooting in February 2018 that Trump held an hourlong televised discussion with a group of lawmakers from both parties about gun violence. As part of the conversation, then-Vice President Mike Pence raised the prospect of empowering law enforcement to take weapons away from those who had been reported as potentially dangerous, though he added that he expected to see “due process so no one’s rights are trampled.”
“Take the firearms first and then go to court,” Trump interjected. At the same event, the president endorsed a law enforcement model in which police officers confiscated some Americans’ guns, “whether they had the right or not.”
Republicans derailed those negotiations and nothing passed, but a year later, Trump nevertheless again advocated a gun bill that included restrictions on assault rifles — which, according to multiple accounts, was one of his long-sought goals.
In other words, as recently as his first term, the president at least briefly sought ambitious gun reforms, up to and including extrajudicial gun confiscations. In his second term, the Republican and his administration have moved aggressively in the opposite direction.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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