The ATF has recently moved to end the “zero tolerance” policy put in place under Joe Biden and then-ATF Director Steve Dettelbach that treated even minor paperwork errors as “willful” violations of agency regulations worthy of license revocations. Under the policy, revocations grew more than 500%, from 30 in 2020 to 195 in 2024. Additionally, more than 1,400 FFLs decided to “voluntarily” surrender their licenses or close their doors in 2024, in some cases after ATF indicated it would pursue revocations.
Biden and his supporters in the gun control lobby claimed that these were “bad apple” dealers who were funneling guns to drug dealers, gang members, and Mexican cartels, even though few of these FFLs ever faced criminal charges or even formal accusations of gun trafficking. And in the waning days of the Biden administration, the ATF reversed the “zero tolerance” policy and once again defined a “willful” violation as one where an FFL knowingly violated a regulation.
In April 2025, the ATF moved to formally repeal the Biden-era rule, cementing the demise of the “zero tolerance” policy. There’s no real evidence that the policy had any substantive impact on public safety, but that isn’t stopping ProPublica from claiming the policy was a huge success… and that its end could soon mean a spike in violent crimes.
The homicide rate fell further last year, but criminologists warn against complacency, because the illicit gun trade is a classic pipeline problem: The harm can take a while to make itself felt. Research has found that the typical “time to crime” for trafficked firearms ranges up to about three years, which means that any positive lag of the anti-trafficking efforts of the Biden years would still be in effect now, with any negative effects of the Trump pullback lying in the years to come.
Among those now sounding the alarm is [former ATF official Marianna] Mitchem. Dismayed at the policy reversal, she left the ATF last spring, after 21 years, and joined Everytown, the gun-safety group founded by Michael Bloomberg.
“Just because no one is watching the trafficking pipelines right now doesn’t mean guns aren’t flowing through it. It just means they’re not being intercepted,” she told me.
“And as you walk away from that, and you don’t have your focus on that anymore,” she added, “that pipeline is going to be flowing, and we are going to start to see the violent crime impact from that over time.”
It’s worth noting that ProPublica never mentions that the initial reversal of the “zero tolerance” policy took place while Joe Biden was still president, since that would undercut the narrative of Mitchem and other gun control activists that President Trump has gutted the agency.
Reporter Alec MacGilles does acknowledge deep into his report that many of the now-former FFLs he spoke to described having their licenses revoked for minor errors like a “mix-up involving an Amish customer’s name” or filling out the Form 4473 for elderly gun buyers with “shaky hands.” One of them even had their license revoked after self-reporting a gun sale that shouldn’t have been made. MacGilles also notes that the “zero tolerance” policy had its share of critics within the agency, who believed that FFLs would be less likely to report suspicious behavior to the ATF if they thought the agency had an adversarial view of the industry and those working in it.
Still, the thrust of his reporting is that the country is a more dangerous place thanks to the Trump administration’s reforms of the ATF, and even if homicides are at historic lows the current policies will lead to more violence at some point in the future.
Eventually, the shift toward immigration enforcement reached even beyond ATF’s agents to the industry operations investigators who inspect dealers. Terrence Robinson had served in that role for six years, based in Baltimore. He took pride in the work, but soon after Trump’s second term began, Robinson realized it would be a turbulent year for his agency. As part of the push by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the government, the ATF offered early retirement to many of its 800-odd inspectors. In the end, some 125 took the offer, threatening to overburden a corps already struggling to inspect even a sliver of the nation’s 130,000 licensed firearms dealers. “ATF does not comment on personnel matters,” Roman said.
Around the same time, Robinson went to inspect the location of an applicant for a dealership license in Baltimore. The city, long wracked by gun violence, has come to have virtually no licensed dealers within its boundaries; those that remain are mostly in the suburbs. Robinson was startled to discover that this applicant intended to sell guns from his apartment in a building downtown, a few blocks from Camden Yards. Robinson voiced his concerns to his supervisor, who told him that he had to approve it. “According to our rules and regulations now, he passed a criminal background check, and he’s a citizen, so …,” Robinson said. “It’s mind-boggling.”
Why is that mind-boggling? It’s hardly uncommon for an FFL to operate out of their home instead of a brick-and-mortar retail location. Often these FFLs are part-time gun dealers or are just starting out in business. Should this particular applicant have been denied solely because of where he lives? Does Robinson believe it would be okay for him to get his license if he lived in a row home in a high crime neighborhood? What about a leafy cul-de-sac in Baltimore County instead of an apartment near the Inner Harbor?
Now that Robinson was gone, his former team was down from 10 to six, with a temporary supervisor. He worried what the changes at ATF meant for public safety. “I’m not saying I can see the future, but I don’t see things getting better,” he said. “I see things getting worse.”
And here’s the thing; sooner or later Robinson will be right. Violent crime in this country has generally been declining since the early 1990s, though there have been years when the violent crime rate rose. In 2020, homicides and violent crimes spiked as courts were closed and jails emptied in response to the COVID pandemic, but that trend was short-lived, and by 2023 rates started declining once again.
At some point, though, crime is going to go up again, whether for a single year or as part of a longer trend like the one that began in the late 1960s and continued until the early 1990s. Gun control activists have been constantly predicting that new crime wave is coming since at least 2022, when the Supreme Court struck down “may issue” carry laws. In truth, though, the gun control lobby has never really stopped claiming that our streets will become less safe unless we adopt more restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms. It’s just part of their script.
If MacGilles is really interested in covering this issue with journalistic neutrality, I suggest he speak with ATF Director Robert Cekada, who told me about the frustration among ATF field agents over a lack of prosecution for straw buys and gun trafficking in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona during the Biden administration. MacGilles should reach out to retired ATF agents who haven’t gone to work for gun control groups like Everytown and those who retired without disgruntled resentment towards the current administration, to hear what they have to say. I think he’d find a very different story if he did that. I’m just not sure it’s one he’d be eager or even willing to cover.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and gun owners.
Help us continue to expose their anti-2A bias by reading news you can trust. Join Bearing Arms VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Read the full article here
