SALT LAKE CITY — On the one year anniversary of the horrific mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, the Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms visited Salt Lake City to meet with regional directors and local law enforcement.
On March 24, 2022, a teenager armed with an AR-15 style rifle murdered 19 students and 2 teachers at Robb Elementary school. So far in 2023, there’s already been more than 200 mass shootings in the U.S.
ATF Director Steven Dettelbach is currently on a whirlwind tour of the country, making sure state and local law enforcement know they have whatever resources they need to help combat the carnage of gun violence and especially mass shootings.
A former United States attorney with numerous awards and degrees from Harvard and Dartmouth, Dettelbach could probably be riding out his career at a big law firm, but there’s another number that prompted him to stay in government.
“Every, single day in the United States, over 100 people lose their lives because of gun violence,” he said.
Last year, Dettelbach accepted the president’s nomination and was later confirmed as ATF director, calling it the single greatest honor of his career.
“And primarily it’s because of the years I spent working with the incredible men and women of ATF that has left a lasting impression on me," he said. “These are people who, every day are running toward the gunfire,
doing nothing other than trying to protect Americans from harm, from violent crime.”
But that can be a significant challenge for a federal agency that is relatively small. The ATF has 5,000 employees, only about half of whom are field agents.
In comparison, the FBI has more than 37,000 employees. So the ATF relies heavily on partnerships and task force groups with local law enforcement all across the country, along with cutting edge technology.
“We can now do better than ever before to identify the trigger pullers, the actual shooters who are terrorizing our communities, and then target them and get them off the streets and in jail where they belong," Dettelbach said.
Right now, Dettlebach says he and others all across the country are trying to do whatever they can to get ahead of the curve to prevent massacres like the one in Uvalde.
“ATF is there not only to respond to those cases, but we’re doing our best to work with state and local law enforcement to get ahead of the curve and try to interrupt the shooting cycle to prevent those crimes from occurring.”
The director knows it won’t be easy and that any talk about firearms can quickly become politicized, yet he remains optimistic.
“People may differ about how they want to do things," he said, "but we can all agree we need to reduce gun crime in the United States of America!”
Another big concern and point of emphasis for the ATF are conversion kits which convert a semi-automatic firearm and make it fully automatic. Dettlebach says from 2017 to 2021, the number of the conversion devices discovered by law enforcement went up 570%.
