Higgins Opens Hearing on Privacy Protections and the Second Amendment
Higgins Opens Hearing on Privacy Protections and the Second Amendment
Publish Date: 2026-05-14 10:37:00
Source Domain: oversight.house.gov
WASHINGTON—Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement Chairman Clay Higgins (R-La.) delivered opening remarks at today’s hearing on “Privacy Protections & the Second Amendment: Examining ATF’s Relationship to the Tiahrt Amendment.” In his opening statement, Subcommittee Chairman Higgins highlighted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’s (ATF) history of abusing the Tiahrt Amendment and disregarding the Second Amendment under the Biden Administration. He also expressed hope that the Trump Administration would end the Biden ATF’s most destructive regulations.
Below are Subcommittee Chairman Higgins’s remarks as prepared for delivery:
Today, the Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement convenes to conduct critical oversight of the agency charged with executing our Nation’s firearms laws – the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF.
We are honored to be joined by ATF’s newly confirmed Director, Robert Cekada. Director Cekada boasts decades of experience and distinguished service within ATF and law enforcement.
Director Cekada’s deep expertise—and his respect for the law and constitutional rights—should give us optimism about ATF’s future posture toward law abiding gunowners and the Second Amendment generally.
Strong, principled leadership at ATF is all the more important now given the agency’s inexcusable disregard of Second Amendment rights over the past several years.
One acute example has been ATF’s repeated failure to abide by a federal law prohibiting the dissemination of firearms trace data, known popularly as the “Tiahrt Amendment.”
Firearms trace data is information about the chain of gun ownership and sale beginning from the point of manufacture—maintained by the ATF’s National Tracing Center, or “NTC”.
Part of a 2003 Department of Justice appropriations bill, the Tiahrt Amendment precludes ATF from sharing this data with anyone other than…
