Steven Dettelbach starts the most public part of his effort to become only the second person to successfully run the Senate confirmation gantlet to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in a political high-wire act at a hearing Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
His nomination coincides with a recent surge in mass shootings and other gun violence that likely will dominate the hearing. Senators will question Dettelbach the morning after a gunman killed 14 students and a teacher at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and 10 days after a racially motivated gunman killed 10 people at a grocery store in a historically Black neighborhood of Buffalo, N.Y., according to authorities in those states.
The Texas shooting comes a little less than 10 years since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., where a shooter killed 26 students and teachers. That and other mass shootings have prompted pushes for gun control legislation from Democrats that have stalled amid Republican opposition in the Senate.
