According to reports, the Department of Justice and ATF are preparing a new firearms regulation package tied to President Donald Trump’s Second Amendment executive order. If true, gun owners should welcome any real rollback of Biden-era abuses. But there is a difference between reform and a press release.
The Trump administration has often said the right things to gun owners. President Trump’s February 7, 2025, executive order directed the Attorney General to review federal actions that may infringe the Second Amendment and create a plan to protect gun owners. The order correctly stated that the Second Amendment is “foundational” and “must not be infringed.”
🚨 Breaking: According to reports, the DOJ is set to announce a firearm regulation package tomorrow!
Attorney General Todd Blanche has stated the DOJ will unveil several new rules.
The Trump admin has previously stated it wants to undo or heavily alter several current ATF… pic.twitter.com/N1J6zbOOFv
— National Association for Gun Rights (@gunrights) April 29, 2026
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi, an appointment that was questioned by many gun owners, later announced a Second Amendment Task Force, promising that the DOJ would use policy and litigation resources to advance Trump’s pro-gun agenda and protect gun owners from overreach.
Good. Now prove it.
Gun owners do not want Biden’s anti-gun rulebook cleaned up, reworded, and left in place for the next Democrat administration to weaponize. They want it ripped out root and branch.
That means the Trump DOJ must stop defending the same Biden-era ATF theories in court while telling gun owners it is on their side. You cannot claim the Second Amendment is no longer a second-class right while your lawyers are still trying to preserve the administrative machinery that treated it like one.
Kill the Frames-and-Receivers Rule
The most obvious test is the Biden ATF’s frames-and-receivers rule. AmmoLand has covered this fight extensively because it goes to the heart of a basic American tradition: peaceable citizens making firearms for personal use. The Biden administration wrapped that tradition in “ghost gun” scare language and used ATF to regulate unfinished parts, kits, tools, templates, and ordinary commerce around home-built firearms.
The ATF’s frames-and-receivers rule, Final Rule 2021R-05F, changed the regulatory definitions of “firearm,” “frame,” and “receiver,” restricted many unfinished frames and receivers, and leaned heavily on the vague word “readily.”
That word is the problem. “Readily” gives regulators room to decide that a chunk of metal, a jig, a template, instructions, or a parts kit has magically crossed the line into a regulated firearm. That is not how criminal law should work in a constitutional republic.
ATF does not get to create felony traps by administrative imagination.
The Trump administration has already sent mixed signals. AmmoLand reported that DOJ and ATF first appeared ready to keep the Biden-era frames-and-receivers rule in place, then reversed course and told litigants in cases including VanDerStok v. Bondi and Defense Distributed v. Bondi that a new rule was coming.
A real reform package should not merely “revise” the frames-and-receivers rule. It should remove it entirely and protect the right of Americans to build firearms for lawful personal use.
End the Pistol Brace Felony Trap
The pistol brace rule should be buried permanently. For years, ATF told Americans that pistols equipped with stabilizing braces were ordinary Gun Control Act firearms. Then the Biden administration decided that millions of those same firearms should be treated as National Firearms Act items. Overnight, lawful gun owners were pushed toward registration, destruction, forced modification, or potential felony exposure.
AmmoLand’s coverage of how ATF’s pistol brace rule is officially dead explained the Mock litigation and how Biden pushed ATF to reconsider braced pistols after years of prior agency treatment. That should have been the end of it.
But gun owners have learned not to trust vague promises from ATF. If DOJ wants credit, it needs to provide clear written protection for braced-pistol owners, manufacturers, dealers, and accessory makers. No secret classification games. No case-by-case ambushes. No “we lost the rule, but we still might prosecute you later” nonsense.
A firearm cannot be legal on Monday, politically inconvenient on Tuesday, and a felony on Wednesday because bureaucrats changed their mind.
Repeal the “Engaged in the Business” Rule
The Biden “engaged in the business” rule was never just about actual illegal dealers. It was an attempt to scare ordinary gun owners away from private sales.
AmmoLand warned about this early, including in its reporting on the ATF’s effort to redefine private-sale activity and personal collections. The concern was simple: the Biden administration was using the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act as a launchpad for a backdoor universal background check scheme.
In January, AmmoLand reported that critics of the rule argued it could force hobbyists, collectors, and occasional sellers to obtain an FFL, conduct background checks, and maintain records previously associated with commercial dealers.
More recently, AmmoLand covered DOJ dropping its defense of the “engaged in the business” rule in Texas v. ATF, noting that the rule created automatic presumptions that put casual sellers at real risk. That is welcome, but the job is not done until the rule is gone.
Americans have always bought, sold, traded, and collected firearms. Selling part of a personal collection does not make a citizen a gun dealer. Trading a firearm does not make him a criminal suspect. Helping a friend find a rifle does not mean ATF gets to treat him like he is running an unlicensed storefront.
If DOJ is serious, it should rescind the rule and make clear that private sales remain private sales.
Make the End of Zero Tolerance Permanent
The repeal of Biden’s zero-tolerance FFL policy was one of the better early moves by the Trump DOJ and ATF.
AmmoLand called it what it was: ATF’s war on gun stores. The Biden policy punished dealers over paperwork mistakes and treated small business owners like enemies of the state. AmmoLand reported that the policy was used against FFLs for minor clerical errors, including issues like transposed serial numbers on Form 4473.
The government’s own announcement admitted the Enhanced Regulatory Enforcement Policy, better known as zero tolerance, was repealed and that inspections would no longer be held to those Biden-era guidelines.
But gun owners and dealers should not have to live election to election, wondering whether ATF will go back to using paperwork as a death penalty for gun shops. A real reform package should lock in discretion for honest mistakes, restore wrongly targeted FFLs where possible, and prevent future administrations from reviving the same anti-industry hit job under a new name.
The right to keep and bear arms includes the practical ability to acquire arms. Destroying gun stores through regulatory harassment is gun control by another name.
Destroy the ATF’s Backdoor Gun Registry
Any Trump ATF reform package that ignores the registry problem is incomplete.
AmmoLand has been warning for years that ATF’s so-called tracing system has become something far more dangerous: a backdoor national gun registry built out of out-of-business dealer records, Form 4473s, bound books, and digitized transaction data.
Federal law is supposed to forbid this. The Firearms Owners’ Protection Act bars any federal rule that requires firearm records or their contents to be transferred to a government-controlled facility and also forbids “any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions.”
Yet ATF’s National Tracing Center says out-of-business records are “integral” to firearm tracing, and that FFLs that discontinue business must send those transaction records to ATF. ATF also says it receives an average of 5 million out-of-business records per month.
When the federal government collects gun-buyer information, stores it, digitizes it, and keeps adding millions of records every month, calling it a “tracing system” does not make it any less of a registry.
AmmoLand reported in 2022 that ATF acknowledged holding 920,664,765 firearms records, with almost 866 million already scanned and digitized. That report also noted that Form 4473 includes personal identifying information about the buyer along with the make, model, caliber, and serial number of the firearm being transferred.
AmmoLand later reported that congressional testimony in 2026 put the number near 1 billion firearm records, with 94 percent digitized. As that article put it, if the government is sitting on a mountain of gun-owner records approaching a billion files, and almost all of it is digitally searchable in one form or another, gun owners were right to call it what it looks like.
That database should not be “reviewed.” It should not be “modernized.” It should not be handed to a new ATF director with a promise that this administration will use it responsibly.
It should be destroyed.
The Trump administration should move to delete every firearm transaction record ATF is not required by law to keep for a specific criminal investigation or lawful trace. Congress should go further and pass legislation requiring ATF to dismantle the out-of-business records database entirely. That is not a radical position. AmmoLand covered Rep. Michael Cloud’s No REGISTRY Rights Act, which would require ATF to delete existing firearm transaction records accumulated by the agency and require FFLs to destroy transaction records when they go out of business so the records do not keep feeding a federal database.
A government that is forbidden from creating a registry should not be allowed to build all the parts of one and then pretend the final switch has not been flipped.
The ATF’s defenders always fall back on the same excuse: traces help law enforcement solve crimes. But a real criminal trace does not require the federal government to maintain a permanent, billion-record database of peaceable gun owners. If ATF needs information for a specific criminal investigation, it can pursue that trace through lawful channels. What it cannot do is warehouse the private purchase records of Americans who have done nothing wrong.
Registration is not paperwork. Registration is power.
A registry tells the government who has what. Once the government has that information, the only question is which administration gets to use it. Gun owners understand history well enough to know that today’s “trace database” can become tomorrow’s confiscation list.
That is why destroying the registry should be part of any serious Trump ATF reform package.
Not limiting it. Not renaming it. Not promising better guardrails.
Destroy it.
The same administration that says it is reviewing Biden’s anti-gun rules should also review the data those rules and prior ATF practices helped collect. If that data creates a registry of firearms, firearm owners, firearm transactions, or firearm dispositions, it should be deleted, physically destroyed, and permanently barred from being rebuilt.
Anything less leaves the weapon in place for the next anti-gun administration.
Fix ATF Classifications and Stop Secret Lawmaking
ATF’s classification system also needs a serious overhaul. For too long, manufacturers and gun owners have lived under a system where the legality of a product can depend on shifting letters, private interpretations, and the political mood inside the Bureau. That is unacceptable.
ATF’s own “New Era of Reform” page says the agency is working on a classifications board, requiring new firearm classifications to be reviewed and approved by the Office of the Director, and ensuring rules implement statutes rather than create new laws by administrative order. It also lists changes like simplifying Form 4473, updating Form 20, improving FATD response times, limiting NICS alerts, and allowing electronic signatures on NFA forms.
Those are the right categories. But gun owners should judge the administration by results, not slogans.
A classification board is only useful if it stops ATF from making secret law. A simplified Form 4473 is only useful if the agency stops treating harmless paperwork errors like crimes. Faster response times only matter if the answers are clear, binding, and consistent.
The rule should be simple: if Congress did not ban it, ATF does not get to invent a ban.
DOJ Cannot Be Pro-Gun in Press Releases and Anti-Gun in Court
This is the biggest issue. The Trump DOJ deserves credit when it repeals bad policy. It deserves credit when it backs away from defending Biden’s “engaged in the business” rule. It deserves credit for ending zero tolerance.
But it also deserves criticism when it keeps defending Biden-era rules, asks courts for more time, or tries to preserve ATF power while promising gun owners reform.
The Biden administration weaponized ATF against gun owners, dealers, builders, and the firearms industry. The Trump administration now has a chance to do more than slow that machine down. It can dismantle it.
That means repealing the frames-and-receivers rule. It means removing the pistol brace rule. It means rescinding the “engaged in the business” rule. It means making the end of zero tolerance permanent.
And it means destroying the ATF’s backdoor gun registry.
Gun owners do not want a friendlier custodian for a billion-record database of private firearm purchases. They do not want DOJ promising that this administration will not abuse the information. They want the information gone.
If the registry is illegal, destroy it. If the rules are unconstitutional, repeal them. If DOJ lawyers are still defending Biden’s anti-gun theories in court, fire them and replace them with constitutionalists.
Voters did not put Trump back in office so the DOJ could manage Biden’s gun-control machine more politely. They expected that machine to be taken apart.
President Trump’s Second Amendment Accomplishments Second Term
About Duncan Johnson:
Duncan Johnson is a lifelong firearms enthusiast and unwavering defender of the Second Amendment—where “shall not be infringed” means exactly what it says. A graduate of George Mason University, he enjoys competing in local USPSA and multi-gun competitions whenever he’s not covering the latest in gun rights and firearm policy. Duncan is a regular contributor to AmmoLand News and serves as part of the editorial team responsible for AmmoLand’s daily gun-rights reporting and industry coverage.
