Not intentionally, of course. The Everytown-backed website would never encourage Trump to take an axe to Joe Biden’s executive actions on guns, but in a new piece reporters Chip Brownlee and Jennifer Mascia lay out all of the actions that Donald Trump can take to undo the efforts of anti-gun activists over the past four years.
The pair say a push to enact national right-to-carry reciprocity is unlikely to clear Congress, which is probably accurate unless Republicans attach that measure to a budget bill that only requires a simple majority through reconciliation. Even if advancing pro-2A legislation is a heavy lift, Brownlee and Mascia acknowledge it will be far easier for Trump to dismantle the executive branch efforts that Biden’s enacted since taking office in 2021; starting with a brand new ATF Director
“At noon on Inauguration Day, we will sack the anti-gun fanatic Steve Dettelbach,” Trump told the NRA in May. “Have you ever heard of him? He’s a disaster.”
Since taking office, Dettelbach has increased oversight of the firearms industry, much of it at Biden’s direction. In 2021, Biden ordered the agency to implement a zero tolerance policy toward gun dealers who willfully sell to prohibited purchasers or fail to conduct background checks. The policy resulted in the ATF revoking more gun store licenses in 2024 than in any year over at least the past two decades.
Biden’s zero tolerance policy wasn’t about shutting down gun stores who willfully sold to prohibited persons. It was about using even minor paperwork errors to revoke FFLs whenever possible.
A single violation can be interpreted as breaking the law and the 1968 Gun Control Act allows ATF to revoke a federal firearm license for a single violation. Previous to the Biden administration, however, minor clerical errors found during inspections were annotated for corrective action with ATF inspectors instructing firearm retailers on how to stay within regulations and laws. That’s no longer the case. Instead of using the ATF as a government bureau to assist the firearm industry to stay within regulations, President Biden and his ATF have turned it into a steel trap by which they snare firearm retailers to run them out of business.
Biden’s zero tolerance policy was part of his whole-of-government attack on gun owners and the firearms industry, which also included a number of rule changes by the ATF that The Trace admits can be “easily rescinded or ignored under a Trump administration.”
Another Biden initiative can also be easily undone: shuttering the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention or re-tooling it to tackle violent crime and promote responsible gun ownership instead of serving as a jobs program for the gun control lobby.
With Trump reelected, “There’s no more White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention,” said Adzi Vokhiwa, vice president of policy at the Community Justice Action Fund, a gun violence prevention group. “I think all of that goes away.”
Democrats on Capitol Hill, including Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida, introduced bills to make the office permanent, but the legislation stalled in a narrowly divided Senate and Republican-controlled House.
Murphy says he’s convinced that Trump will try to roll back or ignore as many provisions of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act as well, including the ATF’s expanded definition of who is “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms.
Some Republicans may support such a move by Trump. That includes Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who was the lead GOP negotiator on the BSCA. Cornyn has faced criticism from gun rights proponents for supporting the bill and was booed at the 2022 Texas Republican Party’s state convention after Biden signed it.
A spokesperson for Cornyn pointed to a letter to the editor the senator wrote in May criticizing the ATF’s interpretation of the law: “I stand by the reforms in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, but I reject the Biden administration’s unconstitutional attempt to exploit this law in order to implement its radical gun control agenda counter to the will of Congress and the people who elected us.”
One thing The Trace didn’t mention is the possibility of using the Department of Justice to target state-level gun control laws. When Missouri adopted the Second Amendment Preservation Act in 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland sued the state in federal court alleging the law violated the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Trump’s Attorney General might be able to go after anti-gun restrictions in states like California, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey that violate constitutional clauses and/or the Second and Fourteenth Amendments. At the very least DOJ could offer support in the form of amicus briefs to challenges brought by Second Amendment groups.
There’s quite a bit that Trump can do on his first day in office to repair the damage done to the Second Amendment by the Biden administration, and The Trace has provided his administration with a helpful roadmap pointing to some of the biggest obstacles erected over the past four years.
We’ll be talking more about this topic on Monday’s Bearing Arms Cam & Co with retired ATF deputy assistant director Pete Forcelli, and I encourage you to tune in to what promises to be a very enlightening conversation.
Read the full article here
