WASHINGTON, D. C. – Less than two weeks before leaving the office where he led national efforts to crack down on gun crimes as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Cleveland’s Steve Dettelbach hadn’t begun to pack.
Photos of the U.S. Attorney offices in Cleveland, Akron, Toledo and Youngstown, which he oversaw during Barack Obama’s presidency, were still on its walls. There was also a huge portrait of former Cleveland Safety Director Eliot Ness, who earned fame for bringing down Mafia kingpin Al Capone and his bootlegging operations.
He hadn’t stopped getting briefings each morning about arrests and cases, issuing reports about the work ATF’s more than 5,000 employees had done to thwart violent crimes, and searching Cavaliers game scores every morning to keep up with his favorite sports team.
“I’m a Clevelander, through and through,” he said. He says he’s got another job lined up, but wouldn’t discuss his next career move until he leaves office on Jan. 17. Although he ran for Ohio Attorney General in 2018, he says he has no future plans to run for office.
His next move comes after a two-year tenure that Republicans — including U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, a fellow Ohioan who chairs the House Judiciary Committee — said trampled on gun rights. Republicans already are crafting plans to gut the ATF in President Donald Trump’s second term.
At a farewell event for Dettelbach on Friday, U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said he earned the respect of ATF’s agents and staff as well as of the bureau’s many law enforcement partners across the country.
“In everything you have done, you have reminded us why ATF does the work it does, why all of us came to law enforcement in the first place — to save lives,” Garland told him
The 6-foot-5-inch former basketball star at Hawken School in Chester Township says he found it fulfilling to oversee ATF’s mission as the only federal law enforcement agency solely focused on violent crime despite the constant exposure to tragedies it entailed. He would have stayed on if a Democrat won the White House.
“It was incredible working with the people here at ATF,” he says. “They are literally running toward gunfire in the worst incidents that happen in this country every single day.”
Dettelbach’s job also involved being at the center of political crossfire over gun regulations. Firearms rights groups saw him as a pariah. Gun safety groups adored him.
Everytown for Gun Safety, which calls itself America’s largest gun violence prevention organization, praised Dettelbach’s service, saying ATF worked alongside local law enforcement during his tenure to oversee a drop in violent crime and take action to track and prevent gun trafficking.
“With violent crime at a near 50-year low, we couldn’t be more grateful to Director Dettelbach for his tireless efforts to keep our communities safe,” said a statement from its president, John Feinblatt.
The organization lauded his implementation of legislation called the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was hailed as the first major gun control in 30 years, and the Biden administration’s “zero tolerance” policy for gun dealers who willfully violated federal gun laws such as failing to conduct background checks and providing firearms to people barred from owning them.
It also celebrated that Dettelbach’s ATF finalized rules to curtail ghost guns and short-barreled assault weapons equipped with arm braces — two gun industry innovations that took off during Trump’s first term when the ATF lacked a leader — as well as unlicensed gun dealing. Dettelbach also raised the alarm on “Glock switches” and other machine gun conversion devices showing up at crime scenes across the country, and helped establish “emerging threats” task forces to crack down on them, the group says.
On the other side of the debate, the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action calls Dettelbach “the most political ATF director we’ve ever seen,” and an “anti-gun extremist” who tried “to execute the Biden agenda of eviscerating the Second Amendment.”
The gun rights group criticized him for implementing agency rules without corresponding legislative mandates from Congress, such as a policy that classifies “stabilizing braces” intended to allow disabled shooters to better control their weapons as short-barreled rifles subject to extra regulations if they modify pistols to be fired from the shoulder.
It also accused Dettelbach of “creatively misinterpreting” a new gun law to justify broadening who needs a federal license to sell guns. Under federal law, an individual who willfully engages in the business of dealing in firearms without a license is subject to a term of imprisonment of up to five years and a fine of up to $250,000, or both.
“While it is a shame that President-elect Trump will not have the satisfaction of firing someone who should never have been nominated to run the ATF, it is still good he will be gone,” said an online post from the organization.
When asked about such complaints, Dettelbach observed that there are currently over 400 million firearms in the United States, far more firearms than the nation’s 341 million population. He says it’s never been easier to obtain a firearm legally, or illegally.
“The notion that people’s rights are somehow endangered is belied by the overwhelming facts that surround us,” he says. ”At the same time, there is a very significant gun crime problem. It’s not hypothetical … It’s something that’s happening every single day. People are being killed and injured in places like New Orleans and New York in cases that you read about, and in the Hough neighborhood and Central and Parma, in crimes you never read about.”
Dettelbach argues stopping gun crimes should transcend politics. He found common ground, for instance, with the National Shooting Sports Foundation for an education program about the dangers of being a “straw purchaser” who buys guns for other people who might commit crimes.
“The temperature on these things has gotten way too hot,” says Dettelbach. “… I just think we have to lower the temperature on this issue significantly. The American people don’t want to see us fight. The American people want to see us fight for them.”
Before Dettelbach was sworn in on July 13, 2022, ATF had only one confirmed director since 2006, when Senate confirmation first became required for the hot potato post. President Joe Biden initially selected former ATF agent and gun control advocate David Chipman for the job but withdrew the nomination amid opposition from gun rights groups.
From 2009 to 2016, Dettelbach served as the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, where he oversaw high-profile investigations and both managed and personally handled big cases. Before that, he spent over two decades as a U.S. Justice Department prosecutor.
He says that heading ATF was different from serving as U.S. Attorney. People in the U.S. Attorney’s office present cases, while ATF agents do the investigations that build up those cases, he says, and he led far more employees in his latest post.
His job at ATF also involved tasks that he didn’t have to do as U.S. Attorney, like visiting wounded agents in the hospital and consoling their families. And while the vast majority of ATF’s resources are spent on law enforcement, it is also a regulatory agency that works with the firearms industry to ensure compliance, he says.
Through partnering with state and local law enforcement, he feels that during his tenure, ATF helped reduce a significant spike in murders and violent crime coming out of the coronavirus pandemic . Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics indicate the national murder rate fell from 0.59 people per 100,000 annually when he took office, to 0.39 people per 100,000 in December 2023, the last month for which statistics are available.
“That doesn’t happen by accident,” said Dettelbach. “I think it happens because of a lot of hard work, smart work, and courageous work by people here, at ATF, and elsewhere.”
On his watch, he says ATF established a new unit aimed at trying to deal with the technological advances that are fueling illegal firearms violence. It formed six firearms trafficking strike forces across the nation to trace the flow of illegally trafficked firearms, set up a national firearms trafficking center in DC to examine connections between different cases around the country, and established the first ATF unit working on the other side of the Mexican border to fight firearms trafficking between the U.S. and Mexico.
He says ATF increased the participation rate of local police departments in the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, which is used to solve gun crimes, from 33% to 66%, and increased ATF’s capacity to run DNA traces on guns and cartridges.
He shows off a small plastic case the ATF patented to help law enforcement scoop up ballistics evidence from crime scenes and preserve them without contaminating it with their own DNA.
“If we have enough money, we’re going to manufacture these and give them to every cop we can in the United States,” says Dettelbach.
He says the agency has prioritized collecting gun violence data, to help law enforcement agencies understand how guns make it to criminals, and how to best protect the public. On Wednesday, ATF released a report on firearms trafficking and how to counteract it.
He has also tried to focus more of ATF’s attention on survivors and victims of crime, installing a display called “The Faces of Gun Violence” in its lobby. It contains 120 portraits of people killed by guns, ranging from victims of domestic violence and mass shootings, to suicides, to police officers shot by criminals.
“These are all just tragedy after tragedy after tragedy,” he says.
He believes there are many factors behind gun violence in the United States, ranging from mental health, to the criminal justice system to the availability of firearms.
He says the people who drive violent crime, and who shoot people, are a small subset of criminals who are “very likely to do it again and again and again.
“It takes a certain kind of person to take a gun and end another human being’s life, and once you get past that barrier, it becomes easier,” he continues, arguing that getting those people off the street both punishes them from what they’ve already done and keeps them from shooting anyone else.
He says firearms violence kills over 100 people each day throughout the United States. When he meets with victims and survivors, Dettelbach says he hears the stories of lives ended “in a split second.”
“I’m worried that it’s happening so much that we’re all sort of becoming callous to it and indifferent to it,” he said. “It is frustration and a concern of mine that we just kind of think it’s part of who we are in America, and it is emphatically un-American, and it hasn’t always been this way in this country. It’s getting worse over time and it hasn’t always been this way. This is not part of our heritage as Americans. It’s not who we are.”
Dettelbach is also concerned that lawmakers cut ATF’s budget last year, reducing the number of ATF agents who are able to protect Americans from violent crime by more than 100. Some Republicans have introduced legislation that would disband ATF.
He says more severe cuts would be “tragic” and make it harder for the agency to support state and local law enforcement.
He argues the policies ATF has pursued have helped significantly reduce violent crime, and it would be dangerous to reduce its efforts and let things “snap back to the place where they were before,” with fewer agents in the field and fewer tools for law enforcement to fight violent crime.
“No single measure will end America’s gun violence crisis,” said Dettelbach. “The scope of this problem is vast, and the challenges are complex, but that cannot be an excuse for inaction. Rather, it must be a call to action. We must try everything within our power. We cannot declare victory, even though the crime rate has come significantly down. Nor can we concede defeat, even though far too many people are still dying.”