Poli Alert Political & Civics
Related Articles
On Monday, President Joe Biden will announce that he is nominating Steve Dettelbach to serve as Director of The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
Dettelbach is a former U.S. Attorney and career prosecutor who spent over two decades as a prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice.
In 2009, he was unanimously confirmed for his position as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio.
Biden had to withdraw the nomination of his first ATF nominee, gun-control advocate David Chipman, after the nomination stalled for months because of opposition from Republicans and some Democrats in the Senate.
Since the position became confirmable in 2006, only one nominee has been able to make it through the contentious confirmation process. Former U.S. Attorney B. Todd Jones was confirmed to the position in 2013 after being nominated by former President Barack Obama. Jones was already acting director at the time of his nomination.
Biden is also set to announce his administration’s efforts to address so-called ghost guns, including banning the manufacturing of kits that consumers can assemble themselves to make a gun that lacks a serial number.
The new Justice Department rule will require that the kits feature serial numbers that law enforcement can use to track weapons used in crimes and that sellers be federally licensed and conduct background checks on buyers.
The White House is expected to also enact a rule changing the current definition of a firearm under federal law to include unfinished parts, AP reports, and make it a requirement that dealers run background checks on people who want to buy ghost gun kits that contain the parts necessary to build a firearm.
“The Biden administration is making sure these kits are treated as the deadly firearms they are,” a senior administration official said ahead of the announcement.
Justice Department statistics show that nearly 24,000 ghost guns were recovered by law enforcement at crime scenes and reported to the government from 2016 to 2020.
