Embattled U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who is in a heated primary race to keep his Senate seat, has sent some pointed follow-up questions to Robert Cekada, deputy director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Tobacco (ATF), following Cekada’s recent confirmation hearing.
In the letter, Sen. Cornyn covered everything from the plan to add 800 new ATF agents to the ATF’s secret “backdoor” registry of 1 billion guns compiled from transaction records of firearms licensees who have gone out of business. Cekada addressed many of the same questions at the hearing, but Cornyn was seeking additional information on the topics.
“At your confirmation hearing, you stated that the ATF is in the process of hiring up to 800 additional ATF agents,” Sen. Cornyn wrote. “However, Congress cut ATF’s budget in its last two funding bills. Can you please provide information on how ATF plans to hire these new agents, where funding will come from, and who authorized the hiring plan?”
Sen. Cornyn had several questions concerning the “backdoor registry,” which many in the gun-rights community see as an illegal threat to the Second Amendment.
“In 2021, ATF revealed to Congressman Michael Cloud that it had 920,664,765 records of guns and gun owners contained in a digital, searchable registry,” he wrote. “ATF has not responded to Rep. Cloud’s request for an updated record request for over a year, and we suspect that there are now over a billion records in ATF’s database, despite Congress banning gun registries under 18 U.S.C. § 926(a). Last Congress, former ATF Director Dettelbach testified that this database is not a registry because ATF pays Adobe Acrobat extra money to remove search-by-name functionality. Is this database an illegal gun registry? What steps do you plan to take to address this registry? Will ATF respond to Congressman Cloud’s inquiry?”
Lastly, Sen. Cornyn expressed his concern about a Biden Administration change to the length of time some firearms sales records are supposed to be kept.
“Until recently, firearms dealers were required to keep certain records of firearms transactions for 20 years,” he wrote. “President Biden, however, changed ATF regulations to require that firearm transaction records be kept permanently—effectively creating a registry of every gun sold from 2002 onwards. However, the national time-to-crime is less than 10 years, and ATF reports very few traces which implicate firearm records that are older than 20 years. Do you oppose the Biden Administration’s permanent gun record keeping scheme? What will you do to ensure gun owner privacy?”
Cynical readers might look at the letter as a way for Sen. Cornyn to bolster his Second Amendment credentials after he came under fire for supporting President Biden’s so-called Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA). Many in the Texas gun-rights community have thrown their support behind his challenger, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, because of Sen. Cornyn siding with the wrong side on that important gun-control legislation.
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