Some elections are won and lost on narrow grounds. But on many of the most important issues of the day, Donald Trump’s policies promise not just to be different from, but the opposite of, Joe Biden’s. One such area is the Second Amendment. Joe Biden was the most anti-gun chief executive since Bill Clinton. Donald Trump, meanwhile, believes in the Second Amendment and has promised to take actions that will affirmatively protect and advance the right to keep and bear arms.
Joe Biden set the tone for his administration’s approach to firearms policy by nominating a professional gun control activist, David Chipman, to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). The NRA helped defeat Chipman’s appointment, but his successor, Steven Dettelbach, was just as bad on the merits, if not as polarizing a personality.
Dettelbach had previously held several positions as an attorney in the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ), including as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio during the Obama-Biden administration. It was revealed during his ATF confirmation proceedings that Dettelbach had never owned a firearm and knew virtually nothing about guns, including how to define the so-called “assault weapons” he had advocated banning during his career. But he proved endlessly pliant to the administration’s gun control schemes, obediently rubber-stamping whatever anti-gun policies were put before him.
The ATF under Biden-Dettelbach promulgated three major anti-gun rules that mainly targeted industry or individual gun owners, rather than violent criminals. The subject matter included braced pistols, the definition of a “firearm” and related marking requirements, and who needed to be federally licensed to conduct firearm sales. The rules provoked numerous court challenges and injunctions; one is still pending decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Enforcement policies also took a dark turn under Biden-Dettelbach. Most notoriously, the administration undertook a “zero-tolerance” policy toward routine inspections of Federal Firearm Licensees (FFLs). Mistakes that once would have been treated as an opportunity to educate FFLs and improve their compliance procedures became the grounds for immediate license revocation proceedings. Livelihood and businesses were lost, as were resources for Americans to lawfully exercise their right to obtain firearms and related items.
Ironically, at the same time the administration was revoking as many FFLs as it could, it was also promoting a policy that made it legally perilous to sell firearms without an FFL, even on a small scale. The administration claimed its goal was to ensure more sales were subject to background checks. But taken together, these moves signaled a desire to expand the administration’s authority to punish as many licensed and unlicensed firearm sales as possible, thus suppressing the market for guns.
Fortunately, the opposite effect occurred. Disturbed by rampant crime and the unraveling of trust in many American institutions – from the media to federal law enforcement agencies – a broadening cross-section of U.S. citizens began embracing their Second Amendment rights for the first time. This included record numbers of women and African Americans.
The ATF’s field operations also took on an increasingly overbearing quality. Citizens made videos of agents visiting their homes for heavy-handed “compliance checks” that lacked any judicial or statutory authorization. The ATF also conducted seemingly gratuitous raids, including on the homes of a high-ranking Arkansas city employee and a Baltimore Second Amendment advocate. Tragically, the former raid resulted in the death of a suspect with no criminal record accused of nothing more than unlicensed sales at gun shows. The latter, meanwhile, terrorized a school district employee and his family and resulted in no seizures of any firearms or ammunition. The justifications for these tactics, if there are any, remain unexplained.
The problems, however, were not confined to ATF. The Biden-Harris administration undertook a “whole of government” approach to suppressing Second Amendment rights, pulling levers throughout the federal bureaucracy to clamp down on gun owners and firearm-related businesses. Career firearm prohibition advocates were put on the public payroll via the so-called White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, headed by none other than vice president and failed presidential candidate, Kamala Harris.
This office was involved in creating a red flag law clearinghouse within the DOJ to promote state laws to seize lawfully owned guns from supposedly “dangerous” individuals. It also held summits with anti-gun state officials to encourage them to pursue other anti-gun policies and litigation within their own jurisdictions.
Lawfare was also the order of the day, with crime-ridden cities looking for scapegoats within the firearm industry and for ways to undermine the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prevents meritless strike suits against gun industry members. American gun control activists even openly colluded with Mexico to try and hold American gun businesses responsible for drug cartel violence south of the border. One of those cases is also before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The U.S. Commerce Department, as well, got involved in the administration’s anti-gun politics, cracking down on licensed firearms exports and creating a “presumption of disapproval” for various types of sales. And the public health apparatus resumed its taxpayer-funded gun control advocacy, under the guise of “gun violence research.”
For his own part, Joe Biden never missed an opportunity to portray violent crime as the by-product of law-abiding Americans owning guns. He repeatedly exploited high-profile crimes to call for broad bans on America’s most popular semiautomatic rifles, whether those types of guns were involved in those incidents or not.
Joe Biden also signed the first significant federal gun control law in almost three decades, 2022’s misnamed Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. It fortunately did not go as far as its most enthusiastic proponents had hoped, thanks in large part to NRA-ILA’s efforts against it. But Biden stretched it as far as he could (and farther than many legislators who voted for it intended) in his campaign to suppress gun ownership.
Fortunately, Americans repudiated the Biden-Harris administration in the clearest possible terms by electing a president who promised to reverse many of its highest-profile policies.
In terms of the Second Amendment, this means repealing Biden’s overreaching rules and executive actions, appointing pro-gun officials and judges, and signing pro-gun legislation that Congress sends to President Trump’s desk.
But NRA-ILA’s efforts are not finished merely because Trump was elected. Indeed, the work of coordinating with pro-gun members of Congress, vetting the records of political appointees and judicial candidates, and ensuring the administration is made aware of emerging threats to the Second Amendment is just beginning. There remain scores of deeply embedded anti-gun employees and officers throughout the sprawling federal bureaucracy. It will take constant vigilance and oversight to ensure they are not able to abuse their positions and authority to harm the right to keep and bear arms and to undermine Trump’s own objectives.
Trump has only four years to accomplish a very ambitious agenda of American First initiatives. Multiple groups will be competing for his attention and priority for their goals. It will take NRA-ILA’s sustained advocacy, and the support of our members, to keep Second Amendment issues front and center and to get pro-gun policies enacted into law.
After four years of working to expose and limit the damage of the Biden administration, it’s time for NRA-ILA to turn the page and begin the hard work of helping American regain its greatness.
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