Bloomberg’s Gun Control Group Isn’t Happy About the ATF’s Director (and Direction)

The gun control lobby had unprecedented access to and sway over the executive branch of the federal government during the Biden administration, but those days are over and the anti-gunners are livid over their loss of power. 

The Trump administration closed the doors to the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and booted gun control activists from their paid positions within the federal government. ATF Director Steve Dettelbach, who was the Biden administration’s second choice after gun control lobbyist David Chipman failed to garner enough votes to be confirmed by the Senate, stepped down as head of the agency as Trump took charge. After temporarily appointing FBI Director Kash Patel and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll to run ATF, Trump tapped longtime ATF employee Robert Cekada as permanent director earlier this year, and Cekada was confirmed on a bipartisan vote with more than a half-dozen Democrats voting in favor. 

Everytown for Gun Safety’s Smoking Gun website has a lengthy piece out today complaining that Cekada is “leaning into right-wing politics in a way that no previous director has.”

Since becoming head of the ATF, Cekada has gone out of his way to prove that the agency has turned a new leaf in an effort to appease gun groups, particularly those that represent the business interests of the gun industry. For example, he recently appeared on Newsmax to criticize cities and states that prohibit assault weapons and high-capacity magazines for “trying to make rubbish of the Second Amendment.” He also said the Department of Justice was doing a “wonderful job fighting back” against those public safety measures in court. Those DOJ lawsuits are unprecedented — just like the ATF director’s comments.

Cekada also derided newly enacted state laws prohibiting Glock-style pistols that are uniquely easy to convert into machine guns with third-party devices called “switches.” Cekada said that “holding Glock accountable for what a criminal’s doing with that firearm makes zero sense,” and that the state laws won’t “do anything. Criminals do not follow the law as it is.”

Cekada isn’t the right’s equivalent of David Chipman. He’s been with the ATF since 2005, and served in the NYPD and the Plantation, Florida Police Department before that. He’s not a Second Amendment activist. He’s a career law enforcement official. 

But Cekada is also a gun owner, and one who’s seen firsthand how the Biden administration’s war on the firearms industry and its customers punished those engaged in legal commerce and the exercise of a fundamental right. When Cekada joined me on Bearing Arms’ Cam & Company, he talked about how the ATF’s rule treating brace-equipped pistols as short-barreled rifles, imposed during the Biden era, even tripped him up. 

ATF Director Robert Cekada says the Biden-era rule on pistol braces nearly tripped him up, and chastised those who say the only reason to own short-barreled firearms is to commit murder… as @bradybuzz head @KrisB_Brown recently told NPR. https://t.co/6HUlqzlM4o

— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) May 20, 2026

I’ll be interviewing Cekada and ATF Director Robert Leider next Tuesday, and Everytown will probably complain about that too, just as they’re bitching about Cekada sitting down with Newsmax and Colion Noir. 

Just to illustrate the unprecedented nature of an ATF director talking to right-wing media outlets, one could only imagine if a previous ATF director had taken to a tour of left-wing media outlets to call for state-level bans on assault weapons. Cekada’s media tour politicizes the ATF in a way that is harmful for the agency’s long-term success and survival, which is predicated on having a neutral and nonpartisan stature among lawmakers and the American people.

Again, Biden nominated a paid employee of the gun control group Giffords to serve as his ATF Director. Did the Smoking Gun ever publish one word criticizing the nomination for its lack of neutrality and partisan nature? 

Of course not. Everytown doesn’t want someone who’s neutral and nonpartisan in that role. They want an anti-gun activist, someone who views the firearms industry as the “enemy”, as Joe Biden called gun makers and sellers. They don’t care that the ATF is pursuing cases against gun stores who are allegedly arming cartels after the Biden administration shut down those investigations. They don’t like that Cekada is turning the agency’s focus to violent criminals, not legal gun owners. 

I don’t get the impression that Cekada is kowtowing to groups like the NRA or National Shooting Sports Foundation. After talking with him, though, I do believe that he wants the agency to use its resources to disrupt gun trafficking networks, to go after straw buyers and the FFLs who turn a blind eye to that practice, and to work with the firearms industry as a partner instead of treating them as an existential enemy. I’ve been impressed with Cekada’s candor, like when I asked him about the case of Patrick “Tate” Adamiak. Cekada maintains that the ATF employees who investigated Adamiak did nothing wrong, which certainly wasn’t what pro-2A groups wanted to hear. But Cekada also said that it was wrong for Adamiak to be sentenced to 20 years in prison for allegedly selling NFA items without a license, noting that other prosecutions involving similar allegations and defendants without a prior criminal history resulted in sentences that were much lighter. 

I think its fair to say that Cekada doesn’t share Everytown’s anti-gun ideology. The gun control lobby may believe that disqualifies him from leading the ATF, and the fact that they’re complaining about things like his willingness to talk to pro-2A outlets like Noir’s show and Bearing Arms’ Cam & Company just shows how angry they are that the ATF is no longer headed up by a lackey willing to do their bidding. 

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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