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Throughout his presidency, President Joe Biden issued a number of executive orders and set many strategies aimed at reducing gun violence.
In his first year back in the White House, President Donald Trump took a sledgehammer to nearly all of them.
“Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated my very first week back in office,” Trump promised National Rifle Association members in 2024.
In reality, Trump’s actions on guns emerged as a series of incremental developments throughout the year. When the administration did announce a policy reversal, it was in the form of a Friday night or weekend news dump.
“They’ve tried to be pretty subtle about it,” said Emma Brown, executive director of the gun reform group Giffords. “I don’t think that that’s a coincidence. I think this is an administration that actually understands where public opinion is on gun safety issues.” Namely, that they support reform, by a clear majority.
As soon as Trump took office on January 20, 2025, The Trace began tracking gun-related developments in real time — at the Department of Justice, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the public health agencies, the courts, and Congress.
Trump has mostly set policy on guns (and everything else) through executive orders, realigned priorities, and redirected funding. As a result, gun dealers have less oversight, funding for gun violence research and community violence intervention has become unstable, and the Justice Department is fighting in court to overturn state gun control laws.
“Trump talks a lot about being the law-and-order president, but at every single turn he’s weakening gun laws and making it easier for dangerous people to get weapons,” Brown said. “On this trajectory, his legacy will be an increase in violence, gun crime, and life lost.”
Here’s everything Trump has — and hasn’t — done on gun policy since retaking office:
Eased up on gun dealer regulation
In 2021, Biden unveiled a strategy to reduce gun violence which included holding rogue firearms dealers accountable for violating federal laws. The policy announcement came a month after The Trace and USA Today reported that the ATF routinely let lawbreaking gun stores off the hook for serious violations that armed violent criminals and supplied gun trafficking networks. Investigators often recommended revoking licenses, only to have their superiors downgrade the penalties to warnings, allowing repeat offenders to stay in business.
In 2022, a year after Biden’s “zero tolerance” policy was implemented, the ATF revoked three times as many gun dealer licenses as it did in 2021. In 2024 the revocation rate hit a two-decade high. But Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, said the policy “unfairly targeted law-abiding gun owners and created an undue burden on Americans seeking to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms.”
In April, Trump repealed Biden’s “zero tolerance” approach, providing far less oversight of bad-apple gun dealers.
Studies have consistently shown that a small number of licensed gun dealers are the source of a disproportionately large percentage of illegal firearms. According to one estimate, 5 percent of federally licensed gun sellers are responsible for 90 percent of recovered crime guns.
“Putting gun dealers who break the law back in business is going to increase crime,” Brown said. Repealing the rule benefits gun manufacturers “who are trying to sell as many weapons as they possibly can.”
The next president can reverse Trump’s executive actions and DOJ policies, Brown said. But “the impact of allowing rogue gun dealers to sell guns again will be felt for many, many years, regardless of the way the next administration functions.”
Cut funding for research and violence prevention
Federal funding for gun violence research and prevention was cut over the past year — and sometimes cut only to be reinstated — leaving academics, clinicians, and violence interrupters unable to rely on a steady source of funding that began to flow during the Biden administration.
Trump halted millions in funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s gun violence prevention research in July, then restored it a month later. He canceled 365 grants for violence intervention totalling $811 million, and $150 million in DOJ grants. He also presided over layoffs at the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and its Division of Violence Prevention. And Trump redirected a community violence intervention grant initiative established by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to fund his immigration crackdown.
To David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, the funding cuts to gun violence research were the most devastating part of Trump’s 2025 agenda. “Research and data matter,” he said. Without it, misinformation can flourish. “It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s much easier to lie without statistics.”
Research also shows us which interventions are working to save lives, Hemenway said. The loss of funding won’t necessarily translate into higher violence tomorrow, but the repercussions will be felt long-term.
Loosened Biden-era rules on gun exports
In September, Trump revoked a Biden-era Commerce Department rule restricting the export of civilian firearms to 36 nations where the risk of diversion to the illegal weapons market was deemed to be high, including Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico — all countries where violence is fueled by American guns. The rules would have cost gun companies hundreds of millions of dollars per year in lost sales.
By reversing the 2024 rule, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security said it was “restoring common sense to export controls and doing right by America’s proud firearms industry, while also continuing to protect national security.”
But there was evidence that the rule was working. A coalition of nonprofit groups objecting to the rule’s rescission wrote that in Guatemala, where more than two thirds of American guns recovered at crime scenes were lawfully exported, exports of handguns and semiautomatic rifles fell to zero after the rule took effect.
While the rule’s revocation won’t affect crime on American streets, “it’s worse for Mexico, and it’s worse for Canada, and it’s worse for Jamaica,” said Hemenway.
Reversed Obama-era rules on gun prohibition for financially incapacitated veterans
When Trump signed the bill reopening the federal government in November, he also signed a provision prohibiting the Department of Veterans Affairs from submitting the names of veterans to the federal background check system if they have been appointed a fiduciary to manage their benefits, reversing an Obama-era policy. The move was part of an effort to strengthen the gun background check system in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, and hotly contested at the time of its adoption.
Reopened a pathway to petition for lost gun rights
The Gun Control Act of 1968 allowed people federally prohibited from possessing guns to petition the attorney general to get their gun rights restored. But Congress defunded the program in 1992. In March, Attorney General Bondi introduced a rule that would restore funding for the rights restoration process and move it directly under the auspices of the DOJ (the ATF used to handle it before).
Under the rule, people convicted of drug trafficking crimes would be able to apply for relief 10 years after they’re released from prison, and people who have served time for misdemeanor domestic violence offenses could apply 10 years after their sentence is up. In April, Mel Gibson was among the first to see his gun rights restored 14 years after he pleaded no contest in 2011 to misdemeanor battery against a former girlfriend.
Advocates for domestic violence victims have decried the proposal.
“It’s taken us decades to get to the place where we recognize the risk associated with firearms, and I cannot fathom making a decision that would undo that,” Anna Harper, the executive vice president of Emerge Center Against Domestic Abuse in Tucson, Arizona, told The Trace’s Alma Beauvais in April.
Ended regulation of pistol braces
In 2021, President Biden directed the DOJ to implement a rule that makes clear that when manufacturers, dealers, and individuals use stabilizing braces that convert pistols into rifles, they’re subject to the requirements of the National Firearms Act, the 1934 federal law that regulates machine guns and short-barreled rifles. That means owners were now required to either remove and destroy their pistol braces or register their braced firearms with the ATF.
Shortly after the rule was finalized in 2023, the Firearms Policy Coalition filed a challenge, which resulted in a victory in a Texas district court. In July, Trump dropped the government’s appeal to the gun lobby’s lawsuit, effectively ending the pistol brace rule’s enforcement. Owners were once again free to use the devices to increase the accuracy of AR-15-style pistols and allow users to fire them much like their rifle counterparts.
Cleared the way for rapid-fire triggers
On May 16, the Trump administration announced an agreement to permit the sale of forced reset triggers, matchbook-sized devices that enable semiautomatic rifles to fire faster than military-grade M16 machine guns. The policy change resulted from a settlement between the Justice Department and Rare Breed Triggers, a North Dakota-based company that had been blocked from selling the devices after the Biden administration secured an injunction in 2023. The policy shift was reportedly made despite the objections of the ATF’s chief counsel, a Second Amendment scholar and gun-rights advocate.
Ended the $200 fee to register machine guns and silencers
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, contains a provision ending the tax that accompanies the registration process for machine guns, silencers, and short-barreled long guns, as set by the 1934 National Firearms Act. The fee, which was largely out of reach for most gun owners at the time (and never changed) was intended to make it harder to acquire a machine gun amid Prohibition-era violence.
Swapped the Office of Gun Violence Prevention for an office of gun rights
In November, the DOJ announced the creation of a gun rights office within its Civil Rights Unit, spelling the end of the first ever Office of Gun Violence Prevention. The new division’s mission is to challenge the constitutionality of state-level gun control laws — essentially doing the work of the gun lobby, which has made lawsuits the center of its efforts in recent years.
This development “didn’t get the attention it should have,” and is yet another example of “the Trump administration moving bureaucratic machinery in favor of the gun industry,” said Brown, the Giffords director.
“They were very impressive about all the innovative, interesting things they did around even just getting all parts of the government together to be on the same page, and tried to get the states to use the money that was available to them,” Hemenway, the Harvard researcher, said. “The evidence looks very good that they were having an effect.”
The first lawsuit, filed last March, accuses the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department of slow-walking concealed handgun license applications. Subsequent suits seek to overturn the U.S. Virgin Islands’ “unconstitutional” gun permitting scheme, a lengthy process that requires gun owners to have bolted-in gun safes, and Washington, D.C.’s semiautomatic rifle ban.
Dropped the Surgeon General’s gun violence advisory
In March, the gun reform group Giffords reported that the Department of Health and Human Services had quietly removed former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s 2024 gun violence advisory from its website. The advisory, the first of its kind, called gun violence an “urgent public health crisis” and pointed to an increase in gun deaths and injuries over the past two decades. The rescission is a point of pride for the National Rifle Association.
Gun safety advocates say this has all made us less safe. “Donald Trump spent his first year in office either ignoring gun deaths across the country, or actively working to unravel gun safety policies,” said Brown.
Trump got some gun world pushback
The NRA marked the close of Trump’s first year back with a celebratory post in its magazine, America’s 1st Freedom, congratulating him on “keeping his word.” But a few of his moves left gun rights supporters unsatisfied.
The Department of Justice argued in court to keep some gun restrictions, maintaining the Biden administration’s litigation strategy on several fronts. The DOJ never dropped its Biden-era opposition to Missouri’s 2021 Second Amendment Preservation Act, which essentially prohibited police in the state from enforcing federal gun restrictions. The Supreme Court killed it for good in October. The DOJ also refused to intervene in a case challenging the federal authorities’ ability to regulate the sale of ghost gun kits and parts used to assemble the weapons.
Gun companies had to contend with Trump’s tariffs, which increased gun and ammunition prices, prompting several big gun makers — including Glock, Beretta, and Springfield — to hire lobbyists for the first time.
The Trump administration’s rightwing ideological bent at times conflicted with its gun rights ethos. In the wake of the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting in Minneapolis, which was perpetrated by someone who once identified as transgender, Trump’s DOJ reportedly weighed proposals to limit transgender people’s right to possess firearms. The idea was flatly rejected by gun rights groups, including the NRA, Gun Owners of America, Firearms Policy Coalition, National Association for Gun Rights, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the Second Amendment Foundation, and Texas Gun Rights
Some gun rights groups also chafed at Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C., which saw the deployment of dozens of ATF agents and resulted in gun possession arrests. And gun rights blogs have questioned aggressive enforcement tactics of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which echo the tyranny they claim to arm themselves against.
“Imagine if the ATF was doing an enforcement push that was a fraction as heavy-handed as ICE’s,” the gun blog Open Source Defense said in a January 15 post.
How far will Trump go in 2026?
“How far Trump is able to push the needle in 2026 depends on the courts,” said Brown, the executive director of Giffords. “We have seen judges strongly defending the rights of communities to enact common sense gun laws across the map.”
Trump may not have to face voters again, but he still cares about public opinion — and so do House Republicans, who have to face voters in November. “We saw $2 billion in mental health grants canceled and then reinstated in under 24 hours because of public backlash,” Brown said. “Our voices have a lot of power.”
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