That alone should alarm every gun owner in America.
Cekada, currently the ATF’s deputy director, delivered the usual reassurances — that lawful gun owners are not the target, that the agency should focus on violent criminals, and that constitutional rights will be respected.
Gun owners have heard these promises before. And they have been betrayed every time.
A Smooth Hearing — And That’s the First Red Flag
The hearing itself was conspicuously tame.
No serious grilling. No accountability. No reckoning for decades of ATF abuses carried out under both Republican and Democrat administrations.
Most telling was the tone struck by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), one of the most extreme gun-ban Democrats in Congress, who openly praised Cekada and spoke approvingly of his service.
That praise should have stopped the hearing cold.
Cory Booker has built his political career on bans, gun registration, red-flag gun confiscation laws, and the wholesale erosion of the Second Amendment.
When someone like Booker is comfortable with an ATF nominee, it is not bipartisanship — it is a warning.
Booker’s approval was not incidental.
It was the clearest signal yet that Washington’s gun-confiscation cartel is perfectly content with whoever runs the ATF.
Establishment Republicans Helped Build This Monster
Booker is not alone.
Cekada’s nomination has also been met with polite acceptance from establishment Republicans who have spent years enabling the very abuses they now pretend to oppose.
Chief among them is Sen. John Cornyn, whose Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) compromise is now nuking his re-election campaign — and for good reason.
That so-called “gun safety” deal handed the ATF the perceived authority to dramatically expand enforcement, including the Biden-era “engaged in the business” rule that treated countless private gun owners like unlicensed dealers and potential felons.
Cornyn sold the BSCA as harmless.
The ATF treated it as a green light.
Gun owners are now paying the price.
The ATF’s Abuses Are Not Ancient History
The core issue is not Robert Cekada’s resume. The issue is the ATF itself.
This is the same agency that:
- Ran Fast and Furious, arming cartel killers
- Invented gun bans through administrative rulemaking
- Reclassified common firearms accessories into contraband overnight
- Conducted armed raids over paperwork errors
- Drove gun dealers out of business through regulatory harassment
- Reinterpreted federal law to expand its own power
These are not mistakes. They are features.
Every ATF director promises restraint.
The ATF does not enforce the law — it creates law, then enforces it at gunpoint.
Reform Is a Lie We’ve Already Lived Through
That is why talk of “reform” is no longer credible.
You do not reform an agency whose mission depends on criminalizing constitutionally protected behavior. You do not fix a bureaucracy that survives by redefining rights as privileges.
And you do not preserve liberty by trusting the same institution that has spent decades attacking it.
No nominee — no matter how polite, polished, or praised by Cory Booker — can change that reality.
Gun owners have tried patience.
They have tried trusting Republicans who promised to “manage” the ATF.
It failed. Every time.
But some in Washington like to sneer at calls to abolish the ATF by falsely comparing them to recent activist chatter about abolishing ICE.
The comparison collapses on contact with reality.
Calls to abolish ICE have only emerged in recent months, driven largely by left-wing activists and a small number of progressive politicians reacting to immigration enforcement.
The argument there is not that ICE abuses lawful Americans, but that enforcement itself should stop in order to protect people who knowingly violated federal immigration law.
The push to abolish the ATF is the opposite.
It exists because the ATF has spent decades targeting lawful Americans, inventing crimes through rulemaking, and trampling a constitutional right.
The Only Solution Is Abolition
The Constitution does not require the ATF.
No confirmation hearing will end the raids.
No director will stop the rulemaking abuse.
No promise will restrain an agency designed to expand its own power.
The time for reform is over.
The time for excuses is over.
The time for abolishing the ATF is now.
Take Action
Gun owners must force the issue. Tell your elected officials in Washington that you are done with broken promises, done with fake reforms, and done with an agency that exists to undermine a constitutional right.
Contact Congress and demand the abolition of the ATF here.
Because no matter who runs it, an unconstitutional agency will always produce unconstitutional results.
