The president, his allies and Justice Department leaders say they're the most pro-gun presidency in modern American history. Many in the gun industry tend to agree with them.
John Commerford, executive director for the National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action, said that the organization views it as the "golden age of the Second Amendment" under Trump.
Commerford spoke to NPR after several recent actions on gun rules taken by the Justice Department.
Just four days after the gunman attack at the White House Correspondents Dinner, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a series of changes to repeal or alter existing firearms regulations. He was joined by Robert Cekada, newly confirmed as head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
"The Second Amendment will never be treated as a second-class right in the Trump administration," Blanche said during the roll out. "The Second Amendment is not negotiable."
The two were flanked by a host of representatives from the gun industry, including from the NRA and Gun Owners of America.
Cekada and Blanche said the new regulations would ease burdens for the firearms industry and lawful gun owners.
The 34 proposed changes – published recently in the Federal Register – seem largely focused on reducing paperwork or formalizing the end to rules that have already been effectively blocked by courts.
Yet they mark the clearest sign yet that the administration is using powers within the DOJ to align itself, and federal regulations, with the wishes of the gun rights movement.
"ATF's mission is to protect public safety and enforce the law – and these reforms reflect our commitment to doing that through regulations that are clear, legally sound, and narrowly tailored to that purpose," Cekada said.
Lawsuits against states' firearm rules
The federal government generally only sets the floor for firearm use and transactions, regulating issues such as background checks, barring most felons from having guns, and establishing rules for dealer licenses. That means most rules that affect individuals' ability to carry guns in public, for example, are set by individual states.
But the Trump administration recently has also started to pursue lawsuits against states that set heavier restrictions on firearms.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger recently signed a bill banning the sale of assault weapons, alongside a package of other gun safety laws – to which Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said, "see you in court."
And earlier this month, DOJ, via Dhillon's Second Amendment Enforcement Task Force, sued Colorado, alleging that the state unconstitutionally bans larger-capacity magazines for rifles. The day before, the DOJ sued Denver over its assault weapons ban.
Gun control advocates worry about those lawsuits and the recent changes to federal regulations.
Of particular concern are the rules that unravel Biden-era regulations like the restriction on pistol-stabilizing braces. This accessory attaches to the end of a pistol, making shooting more accurate and allowing users to fire the gun like a rifle. In 2021, a gunman used the accessory to kill 10 people at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colo. The rule went into effect in 2023, requiring owners of these braces to destroy them or register their braced guns with the ATF. This, too, was previously blocked by the courts.
"There's no public safety argument that can possibly be made for why you would want to eliminate the regulation of stabilizing braces. Because literally, if you buy that product and put it on a pistol, it becomes a short-barreled rifle. And the purpose of that is mass killing," said Kris Brown, president of Brady, a non-profit gun control advocacy group.
"You cannot be tough on crime and support the deregulation of stabilizing braces. Full stop. And that's really an analogy for the rest of [the regulations] we see here."
In a preemptive response to criticism, Cekada said during the press conference: "I've been a law enforcement officer for over 34 years. I would never let the public be at risk based on the regulations that we are proposing today."
How things have changed
The administration's actions add to a slate of gun-friendly policies out of Congress and the courts.
"We're winning on all fronts," said Aidan Johnston, director of federal affairs for the Gun Owners of America.
He ticked off examples such as the Supreme Court's 2022 decision in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. It overturned New York State's strict limits on who could carry a gun outside their home, setting off a wave of challenges to similar state restrictions.
Then Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year on a Republican-only vote, which eliminated an old $200 National Firearms Act tax for silencers, short-barreled rifles and other weapons. The tax was meant to serve as a financial deterrent on these highly lethal weapons when it was established in 1934. (The cost of the levy had not changed since it was established).
"Then, you have the administration purporting to be the most pro-Second Amendment in U.S. history. So I think we've got all three branches of government right now where we're progressing," Johnston said.
The administration's deregulatory push comes as deaths from firearms continue to be a major cause of death in the U.S., and the leading cause of death for those who are 1 to 19. Around 44,000 people – adults and children – died of gun-related injuries in the U.S. in 2024, according to the Pew Research Center, which analyzed the latest available figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While the overall number of gun deaths, — most of which were suicides — fell for the third consecutive year, it was still among the highest annual total on record, according to Pew.
Nearly every week has its own example of a mass shooting in the U.S. Recently, a man with a history of violence fired 50 to 60 rounds from an assault-style rifle into cars and at pedestrians, in Cambridge, Mass., an area with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. Two people were critically injured, according to WBUR.
And last month, a father in Shreveport, La., allegedly killed eight children, including seven of his own, and shot and injured two women.
But those incidents did not ignite the usual calls for changes to American gun laws that usually follow such violent attacks.
Congress last passed major gun legislation in 2022 with the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, considered to be the most sweeping legislation on firearms in decades. The ATF is now working to unravel some of those changes.
Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., chair of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, said in a statement that Democrats would continue pushing for "universal background checks, safe storage, and red flag laws," which he said "have overwhelming support from Americans on both sides of the aisle and will remain a top priority once we take back the majority."
A divided public
But with Congress as contentious and narrowly split as it is, "There is no expectation that we will see any new gun laws anytime soon," said Robert Spitzer, a distinguished service professor emeritus of political science at SUNY Cortland and an expert on gun policy.
"We are very much at a crossroads with respect to gun policy in America," Spitzer said, adding that that comes despite public support for most proposed gun restrictions.
From the other side, Johnston, with Gun Owners of America, said he's seen a shift among Americans' views on gun control that make it less of a "winning issue" in elections.
He points to the fact that since the pandemic, the number of gun owners has risen and there's a growing number of women and people of color buying firearms.
"I really think that the Democratic Party has kind of fallen behind on where their base is, too, on these issues," he said.
There's data that backs up both Spitzer and Johnston's views. A survey from Gallup after the 2024 election showed that a majority (56%) of Americans supported stricter laws covering the sale of firearms and a slim majority (52%) supported a ban on assault weapons. But support for a ban on handguns dropped to a near-record low.
Emma Brown, the executive director of Giffords, a legal and advocacy group working to prevent gun violence, shared Rep. Thompson's sentiments but acknowledged, "There's not enough urgency from our leaders. There's not enough action from our federal elected officials in particular" to get those laws passed at a federal level.
Giffords is led by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who herself suffered a severe brain injury from a shooting.
However, Brown said the organization has seen "tremendous progress" at the state level over the last decade on getting gun control laws passed in blue states.
"It's not a mystery why there is such a gap between public opinion and public policy on this issue. It's the influence of the gun industry," Brown said.
The administration's ties to the firearm industry
Trump's history with the gun industry goes back to his first run for the White House. The NRA was the first significant interest group to endorse him in 2016 and endorsed him again in 2024, Spitzer said.
The Trump administration attempted to ban bump stocks during his first term after a gunman killed 60 people and injured 400 at a Las Vegas concert, setting off public outcry over use of an attachment that allowed him to shoot a semiautomatic rifle almost as fast as a machine gun.
But since Trump's return to the White House, the tone has shifted, with Trump in an executive order calling for a review of all Biden-era firearms regulations and policies and elimination of "all infringements on Americans' Second Amendment rights."
Speaking on the podcast "Gun Talk" while at the NRA convention earlier this year, Blanche described the administration as uniquely committed to the firearms industry and Second Amendment advocacy.
Blanche also noted his personal ties to the firearms industry, including that his wife's family owns Check-Mate Industries, a longtime manufacturer of firearm magazines.
He said the administration's goal is not simply to reverse Biden-era policies temporarily, – but to build legal and regulatory changes that are more difficult for future administrations to unwind.
"We're not gonna take two steps forward," Blanche said on the podcast. "We're gonna go forward a mile."
The administration hired longtime Second Amendment scholar Robert Leider as ATF general counsel and tasked him with reviewing federal gun regulations. Blanche called Leider "a genius" on gun issues and said the administration instructed him to "rework every single regulation consistent with this president's directive."
Fight in states, and heading to courts
The Justice Department's latest batch of regulatory changes looks like it's also headed to a judicial showdown, sparking calls for lawsuits from both those who embrace gun ownership and those calling for gun control.
Johnston, with Gun Owners of America, praised some items in the regulatory package but argued several proposed changes do not go far enough.
"This is not some sort of radical revision to federal firearms laws that's going to make gun owners' lives easier all the time and every day," said Johnston. "I don't see anything close to that in these 34 rules as far as big, huge Second Amendment wins."
He said the organization plans to sue over other changes, including a change to how long firearm records must be kept.
The Biden administration sought to keep these records, including the personally identifying information of gun owners and their guns, indefinitely. The Trump ATF is proposing keeping the records for 30 years or so.
The Gun Owners of America says the whole registry, as they see it, as illegal and posing privacy concerns.
On the other side, gun control organizations including Giffords and Brady told NPR they are also prepared to challenge portions of the final ATF rules in court that they view as dangerous to public safety.
"Our mission is to free America from gun violence. These regulations go absolutely in the wrong direction," said Brown, president of Brady.
Spitzer said it's hard to know right now how these challenges will be decided.
He said, "You've got very conservative justices at the Supreme Court that have viewed gun laws with great suspicion. But also a court that has ruled that administrative rulemaking has gone too far."
He pointed to the Supreme Court's 2024 decision striking down the Trump administration's bump stock ban — not on Second Amendment grounds, but because the court found the ATF exceeded its authority when it banned the devices.
For their part, administration officials said they're prepared for the legal fight.
"We're gonna get sued the day after we release these regs," Blanche said on the "Gun Talk" podcast. "We don't care. That's what we expect."
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