The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF’s) Chris Bort tried to show Face the Nation how easy it was to assemble a “ghost gun” but never managed to make the parts fit together.
His problems assembling the gun came after he struggled to take apart what appeared to be a Glock handgun, perhaps the simplest semiautomatic handgun to disassemble.
The segment began with Bort picking up the Glock to take it apart and eventually turning so that his body blocked the Face the Nation reporter’s view as he struggled to get the slide to come off the frame. He eventually sat the gun down and picked up another gun, which he managed to take apart:
WATCH: Chris Bort—the acting chief of the ATF's Firearms Ammunition Technology Division—struggled at disassembling a Glock style handgun during a made-for-tv scaremongering interview with Steven Dettelbach, the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms on CBS News. pic.twitter.com/rzcZ0lFGmB
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) March 4, 2024
After successfully taking the slide off the second handgun, Bort then grabbed a different frame to show how easy it is to take parts and put them together to construct an operational firearm. The only problem: The slide would not fit on the frame, so Bort just put the parts down.
ATF director Steven Dettelbach then began talking to the Face the Nation reporter and, as he did, Bort picked up the handgun he had initially failed to disassemble and tried again to take it apart. He failed again.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a pro-staffer for Pulsar Night Vision. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at