The only way that the 2024 presidential election could have gone better for advocates of the Second Amendment is if their victory had been even bigger. Americans elected a pro-Second Amendment president—and, in the process, defeated a candidate who had tried to hollow it out; they elected a pro-Second Amendment U.S. Senate—and, in the process, removed politicians whose actions did not match their rhetoric; and, at press time, they appeared to have elected a pro-Second Amendment U.S. House of Representatives—thereby ensuring that no radical anti-gun bills will gain traction. When all parts of the new government are sworn in, it will mark the first time in six years that Washington, D.C., will discuss how to expand, rather than contract, the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
Toward the end of the campaign, Kamala Harris (D) and Tim Walz (D) evidently felt a need to pretend that they posed no threat to gun owners. During the sole presidential debate, Harris told Donald Trump (R), “We’re not taking anyone’s guns away.”
Shortly after, Harris and Walz both emphasized that they owned guns themselves—even if, in Harris’ case, she couldn’t remember which one, and, in Walz’s case, he couldn’t remember how to load it.
The compliant media dutifully suggested that, with rhetoric like that, the Harris-Walz ticket had “moderated.” Appropriately, though, the public did not buy the ruse. Harris has a long history as a gun-control extremist, having supported a measure to ban handguns in San Francisco in 2006; having argued that the Second Amendment meant nothing in 2008; and having proposed the confiscation of AR-type rifles in 2019. Relative to these positions, Harris’ positions in 2024 were marginally less severe. But she still sought to impose “universal background checks,” to ban so-called “assault weapons,” to prohibit standard-size magazines, to impose “red-flag” laws and to stack the judiciary with judges whose views on the Second Amendment echo the one she held before she felt a need to pretend otherwise. Last November, these policies were soundly rejected by an electorate that contained more than 20 million more gun owners than there were in 2020.
As was the case in 2016, the most obvious consequence of the result will be seen in the judiciary. It remains a disgrace for the ages that the U.S. Supreme Court’s seminal Second Amendment ruling, D.C. v. Heller (2008), was decided 5-4 rather than 9-0, but it also serves as a warning that, if the wrong people gain power, they will attempt to overturn it in a heartbeat. At present, two of the pro-Second Amendment judges on the Supreme Court are also the oldest. Justice Clarence Thomas is 76, and Justice Samuel Alito is 74. In addition, the Court’s Chief Justice, John Roberts, is 69. Statistically, the likelihood of one or more of these justices leaving the Court during the next four years is fairly high. Had Kamala Harris been president when it happened, the Court could plausibly have been flipped from a 6-3 pro-Second Amendment majority to a 5-4 anti-Second Amendment majority. If that happened, the holdings in Heller, McDonald, Bruen and others could have been thrown into jeopardy.
By electing Donald Trump as president—and by returning a Senate majority that is filled with friends of the right to keep and bear arms—the American public has not only ensured that this will not happen, but raised the possibility that the Court will become even more solid than it already is. Having been president once before, Trump already has a track record in this area, and that record is exemplary. For four years, at least, Americans can be assured that no judge who buys the conspiracy theory that the Second Amendment is meaningless will make it on the federal courts.
The same rule will apply to appointments to the executive branch. When Joe Biden steps down as president of the United States, the Senate-approved members of his administration must all go with him. President Trump should replace the surgeon general, Vivek H. Murthy, with a figure who will not spend his time lying about gun owners and attempting to pathologize the right to keep and bear arms into a disease that can be eradicated. Trump said he will replace the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Steven Dettelbach, with a person who is committed to enforcing the law as Congress has written it. He should replace the leaders of the Department of Justice, and make it clear to the newcomers that they are prohibited from pushing “model” gun-control legislation on the states. He no doubt will instruct the officials in all federal law-enforcement agencies that their job is to go after criminals, not to harass law-abiding gun manufacturers, gun stores and gun owners. And, on day one, he should abolish the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which was established by the Biden administration with the sole purpose of using the federal government to undermine the Second Amendment.
More broadly, the Trump administration no doubt will ensure that all members of the Cabinet—however seemingly disconnected from the issue—are committed to the right to keep and bear arms. During the Clinton administration, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development—of all people!—spent time pushing for gun-control. During the Obama administration, the president’s foreign policy team attempted to use an international Arms Trade Treaty to create a backdoor to the mandatory regulation of “small arms and light weapons.” As recent history shows, it is naive to assume that a given role within the executive branch has nothing to do with protecting the U.S. Bill of Rights. If a person wishes to exercise power within the new Trump administration, that person ought to promise fealty to the unalienable rights of the people.
At the policy level, a newly inaugurated President Trump no doubt will immediately reverse the slew of illegal regulations and executive orders with which President Biden has attempted to unilaterally reshape the legal landscape. Since January of 2021, Biden has boasted openly about how many rules he has tried to change on his own, having penned redefinitions that affected background checks, pistol braces, forced-reset triggers, “ghost guns” and more. None of these changes were authorized by Congress, and most of them have been stopped in the courts. To guarantee that none slip through the cracks, President Trump can withdraw those that are pending and begin the process of resetting the status quo on the rest. Where applicable, Congress can also use its powers to obviate Biden’s changes.
In 2017, soon after the start of Trump’s first term, Congress overturned a disgraceful Obama-era rule that would have prohibited Americans who could not manage their financial affairs from owning firearms. This time around, dozens of Biden-inspired intrusions should meet the same fate.
And then there is the law. On the campaign trail, President Trump repeatedly promised that, if he won, he would sign a bill guaranteeing national concealed-carry reciprocity. This time, Congress ought finally to get it done. At various points in the recent past, such a measure has enjoyed majority support in both the House and the Senate, but it has never passed both chambers at the same time. Given that the Senate filibuster requires any provision to clear 60, not 50, votes, the odds are still long. Nevertheless, three big things have changed since the last major push in 2017. First, in the Bruen decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has confirmed that the Second Amendment protects the right of all law-abiding citizens to carry a firearm for their protection. Second, the number of states that have abolished their permitting processes completely (to become constitutional-carry states) has increased from eight to 29—reflecting a sea change in thinking on the issue. Third, the Democratic Party has picked up a block of Senate seats in states such as Arizona and Georgia that feature solid majorities of pro-gun voters and strong state-level protections of the right to keep and bear arms. Politics, as the old saying has it, is the “art of persuasion.” The new president and Congress ought to introduce a bill to guarantee that a concealed-carry permit issued in one state must be recognized in all states, and challenge the measure’s opponents to explain why they believe that a handful of jurisdictions should be able to opt out of the Constitution’s protections.
Concurrently, Congress ought to renew its push to pass the Hearing Protection Act. It is preposterous that suppressors (colloquially known as “silencers”) are among the items that are singled out for special regulation in the 1934 National Firearms Act, and we are unlikely to have a better chance of changing that than we have now. Although any reduction in the number of gun-control measures will draw reflexive opposition from the habitual opponents of the Second Amendment, the case against treating suppressors as exotic weapons is strong, self-evident and easily explained. In much of the rest of the world, suppressors are seen as desirable safety features that make it easier for shooters to practice with their firearms without the risk of damaging their hearing over time. The term “common sense” is thrown around far too much in our politics—often as a substitute for “my opinion”—but, in this case, it really is profoundly obvious that to charge Americans a $200 tax and force them to go through a convoluted process before they may take possession of a device that protects their ears does nothing useful whatsoever.
Finally, the return of unified government to Washington, D.C., provides a golden opportunity to correct many of the falsehoods that have been uttered by President Biden, Kamala Harris and many of the other members of the administration they led. Ultimately, the renaissance in the right of the people to keep and bear arms came about because the pro-Second Amendment side won the argument. We won the historical argument. We won the judicial argument. And, above all, we won the political argument. That process is not finished, because no political process is finished. Every election brings with it the occasion to persuade a new set of voters. Each generation must relearn the lessons that were internalized by the last. Repeatedly, President Biden used the megaphone that the presidency accorded to him to attempt to persuade the public that the Second Amendment required Draconian restriction. To this end, he lied about the private ownership of cannons, made fun of hunters, proposed that rebellion against tyranny is impossible and called for the prohibition of a rifle that is owned by more than 20 million Americans.
Mercifully, Biden’s public arguments do not seem to have helped his cause. Indeed, during Biden’s presidency the number of gun owners not only increased, they became more diverse than ever before. This, though, should not lead us into complacency. As Frederick Douglass liked to say, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” In a country that changes as fast as America does, that vigilance can be more necessary than elsewhere.
In 2026, the United States will celebrate its semi-quincentennial—or, more plainly, its 250th year—since it declared its independence in 1776. That moment will bring with it a public reaffirmation of the country’s core ideals. One of those ideals, in the words of the Constitution’s author, James Madison, is that “Americans have the right and advantage of being armed, unlike the people of other countries, whose leaders are afraid to trust them with arms.”
President Trump, along with the pro-freedom Senate and, hopefully, House, will soon be busy working on a thousand different things, but they ought to take the time, now and then, to press the case for one of the key liberties that undergirds the Republic—one of the few without which all the others fall into dust. Last November, the promise to protect the right to keep and bear arms helped propel a new swathe of candidates into office. Next comes the hard work of repaying that sacred trust.
