On Jan. 20, President Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. By Jan. 21, the website for President Joe Biden’s ill-named White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention had been taken down.
Established on Sept. 22, 2023, the office served as an interagency hub for the Biden-Harris administration’s wide-ranging anti-gun agenda. Speaking with anti-gun media outlet The Trace in late January, Greg Jackson, former White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention deputy director, explained how the office was designed to advance the Biden-Harris administration’s “whole of government” approach to suppressing Second Amendment rights. Jackson told the propagandists, “Within our first week on the job, there was a cabinet meeting where the president and vice president challenged each agency to do more. We worked with each agency to develop a suite of actions.”
Rooting out all aspects of Biden’s pernicious gun-control program and advancing the interests of gun owners will require a similar government-wide effort. Less than three weeks into his second term, President Trump has made clear that he is equal to the challenge. On Feb. 7, President Trump signed a sweeping executive order protecting Second Amendment rights.
The contrast with the Biden-Harris administration could not be starker. In her earlier role as San Francisco district attorney, Kamala Harris had argued that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right, and the 2024 Democratic platform she ran on didn’t even mention the right to keep and bear arms.
President Trump’s executive order, by contrast, announced: “The Second Amendment is an indispensable safeguard of security and liberty.” Moreover, it acknowledged that the Second Amendment is “foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”
With this understanding, President Trump tasked Attorney General Pam Bondi to “examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies to assess any ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens” and to report back to the White House with a plan of action to address these matters within 30 days. Rules and enforcement policies promulgated under the Biden-Harris Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were identified for scrutiny.
While the executive order demands a review of the entire executive branch, the logical starting point is to begin undoing the damage perpetrated by the Biden-Harris administration’s politicized Department of Justice and its subordinate agency, ATF. Moreover, some of what can be done dovetails with other Trump administration priorities.
On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order instituting the president’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). A project spearheaded by captain of industry Elon Musk, DOGE has been tasked by the president to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
An early target for DOGE has been to address foreign-aid grants, which produced results—but there are also DOJ grants that threaten gun owners’ rights here at home.
In June 2023, the U.S. Congress passed, and Biden signed, the poorly named Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA). To his great credit, Donald Trump took to his Truth Social media platform to oppose the legislation and warn of its potential ramifications at the time.
Every early indication demonstrates that this White House intends to make protecting Second Amendment rights a priority.
Part of this gun-control omnibus bill altered the statute concerning the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program, which the DOJ notes is the “leading source of federal justice funding to state and local jurisdictions,” to authorize grants to states to implement so-called “extreme risk protection order programs” (ERPOs)—that is, red-flag gun-confiscation orders.
Firearm owners oppose ERPOs because they provide a mechanism to strip law-abiding Americans of their Second Amendment rights in a civil procedure without adequate due process of law. These laws typically permit the government to seize a person’s firearms and extinguish their Second Amendment rights ex parte, meaning an initial order is issued without prior notice and without a hearing for the person to rebut the allegations against them.
During the BSCA negotiations, some supporters of the bill contended that to be eligible for the grant funding, state ERPO programs would be required to meet “strict” due-process requirements. The text of the legislation included language limiting ERPO program eligibility to those that include “pre-deprivation and post-deprivation due-process rights.”
In what should come as a surprise to no one, the Biden-Harris DOJ ignored these protections, shoveling taxpayer money to states with ex parte gun-confiscation orders. A pro-gun administration could ensure that any future Byrne grant awards conform to a judicious reading of federal law.
Worse, some of the funds allocated under the BSCA have gone to gun-control advocates pushing red-flag gun-confiscation laws.
In March 2024, the Biden-Harris Justice Department teamed up with the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University to launch the National Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) Resource Center. Biden’s Justice Department doled out $2 million to the Bloomberg School of Public Health for its part in the effort, which includes a website that extols the benefits of red-flag laws, summarizes existing state red-flag laws and provides training in the laws’ implementation. The website even links to fillable forms that can be used to apply for a red-flag order in certain jurisdictions.
Given the Biden-Harris administration’s imprecise approach to BSCA grant funding, DOGE would also do well to ensure that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public-health agencies are operating within the letter and spirit of the Dickey Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funds “to advocate or promote gun control.”
Of course, undoing Biden’s damage requires far more than addressing improper spending.
Rebuilding trust between Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs, or gun dealers) should be a top priority. ATF has correctly acknowledged that “FFLs are often our first line of defense against gun crime and are often a source of critical enforcement information.” However, under the Biden-Harris administration, FFLs were too often treated by ATF as adversaries to be eliminated.
On June 23, 2021, the Biden White House made clear their intent to target FFLs for license revocation when it announced a policy of “zero tolerance” for so-called “rogue gun dealers” who “willfully violate the law.” Willfulness has specific meaning in the context of federal firearms licensing law and requires the government to prove “a purposeful disregard of, a plain indifference to, or a reckless disregard of a known legal obligation.” This important “willfulness” standard was put in place with the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, following years of government overreach.
Under Biden, ATF effectively read the “willfulness” standard out of federal law. Under ATF Order 5370.1E, issued on Jan. 28, 2022, FFLs were targeted for license revocation over infractions such as harmless paperwork errors.
If putting small businesses out of business and making it harder for Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights was the goal, the Biden ATF succeeded. Consider, in the last six months of 2021, only five FFLs had their licenses revoked and 24 FFLs “voluntarily ceased operations following an inspection.” In 2024, a whopping 147 FFLs had their licenses revoked and ATF muscled another 74 out of business “voluntarily.”
Faced with a lawsuit challenging the zero-tolerance campaign, ATF rescinded Order 5370.1E in the waning days of the Biden administration. While that was a positive step, ATF will need to take additional actions to rebuild trust and cooperation with FFLs.
At the same time the Biden ATF was busy putting FFLs out of business, it was perverting federal law to restrict private firearm transfers between non-licensees—or to at least give that impression.
Under federal law, those “engaged in the business” of selling firearms must acquire a federal firearms license and transfer firearms to non-licensees pursuant to a background check and certain recordkeeping requirements. Gun owners transferring firearms from their personal collections are under no such obligation.
In a ham-fisted attempt to enact by executive fiat a failed gun-control legislative priority, so-called “universal” background checks, the Biden-Harris administration issued Final Rule 2022R-17F, misinterpreting “engaged in the business” to subject a wide swath of firearm transfers to government intrusion. Notably, the ATF rule made clear that core aspects of its expansive interpretation would only be used in civil procedures, which is tantamount to an admission that those aspects could not survive the enhanced scrutiny of criminal proceedings.
Then there are the Biden-Harris administration ATF rules that restricted the types of firearms Americans can access. In April 2022, the Biden ATF issued Final Rule 2021R-05F, expanding the definition of what is considered a firearm frame or receiver under federal law. The move was a transparent attempt to curtail the longstanding right of law-abiding Americans to make firearms for their personal use without government interference.
In January 2023, the Biden-Harris administration performed an ATF flip-flop when it issued Final Rule 2021R-08F, effectively outlawing the use of popular pistol-stabilizing braces, which help disabled shooters and others better utilize a pistol one-handed. The rule was eventually enjoined by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, but in recent days, NRA learned that ATF has still been trying to impose their improper interpretation of federal law.
This just scratches the surface of issues that a motivated Trump administration could address to unravel the Biden-Harris war on gun owners and advance the cause of liberty. Every early indication demonstrates that this White House intends to make protecting Second Amendment rights a priority and that gun owners and industry members can look forward to brighter days ahead.
