The author is a retired ATF Deputy Assistant Director.
By Carlos A. Canino
The idea of merging the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) isn’t new. It surfaces every few years, usually pitched as a way to streamline federal law enforcement and cut costs. But anyone who has spent time on the front lines knows this isn’t just a bureaucratic reshuffling — it’s a bad idea that would undermine public safety and weaken our fight against gun crime.
I spent nearly three decades at ATF, much of that time investigating firearms trafficking, violent gun crime, and the networks that supply firearms to criminal organizations. ATF is a small agency by federal standards, but our size is our strength. We build trust with local law enforcement partners. We focus on firearms trafficking, domestic gun violence, and the forensic and intelligence systems that help connect guns used in crimes to shooters and traffickers.
DEA’s mission is fundamentally different. They target drug trafficking organizations, often focusing on international cartels and large-scale smuggling operations. They have a paramilitary culture and deploy in large, coordinated task forces. That model works for the drug war — but the fight against gun crime in our neighborhoods demands a different approach: precision, patience, and deep partnerships with local police departments.
Merging ATF into DEA wouldn’t just bury the firearms mission under a much larger narcotics bureaucracy — it would destroy the culture, focus, and intelligence-driven systems that have taken decades to build. Programs like the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN), Crime Gun Intelligence Centers, and ATF’s regulatory oversight of the firearms industry would be absorbed into a drug agency with little experience or appetite for regulating the gun market.
Politicians often tout these mergers as cost-saving moves, but they rarely produce the efficiencies promised. What they do produce is confusion, cultural clashes, and years of lost ground while leadership fights over priorities and turf. Meanwhile, the criminals we’re supposed to be stopping don’t wait for Washington to get its act together.
If we want to reduce gun violence, we need to strengthen ATF — not dissolve it into another agency. We need resources to hire more agents, expand NIBIN (National Integrated Ballistic Information Network), improve our industry oversight, and work alongside local law enforcement to identify trigger pullers and traffickers. Combining us with DEA would do none of that.
I worked very closely with DEA throughout my career. I’m very close friends with a lot of retired DEA agents. It’s a great agency. But history should guide us. Merging U.S. Customs and INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) hasn’t really been effective. If anything, it destroyed a great agency that was U.S. Customs .
I know firsthand the men and women of ATF. They’re professionals who have dedicated their careers to protecting communities from gun violence. The work is hard, dangerous, and often thankless. The last thing they need is another political science experiment from Washington.
We don’t need mergers. We need commitment, resources, and leadership that understands the unique challenges of gun crime in America. Anything less is just politics at the expense of public safety.
