Trump is making it easier than ever for criminals to get guns

The Hill

7 hours ago

Campaigning in 2024, Donald Trump made clear where he stood on gun policy when he pledged to 'terminate every single one of the Harris-Biden's attacks on law-abiding gun owners his first week in office and stand up for our constitutionally enshrined right to bear arms.'
What he didn't say was that he would enact the most criminal-friendly gun policy of any presidential administration in U.S. history.
As expected, Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi have moved to roll back Biden-era gun policies that took a tougher line on gun dealers who falsified records, on gun purchases that avoided required background checks, and that regulated 'ghost guns' to require serial numbers on formerly untraceable guns or gun parts.
Central to Trump's deregulation of gun access is his evisceration of the federal agency charged with administering the nation's gun laws, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. For decades, gun rights proponents have pilloried the ATF, calling it 'scandal-ridden,' an out of control 'rogue agency' that has persistently abused its power, and that had amassed 'a tyrannical record of misconduct and abuse.'
To be sure, the ATF has blundered, as when it tragically mishandled the siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas in 1993, and when it botched a covert gun-running operation into Mexico, named 'Fast and Furious,' in 2009. But these incidents, along with the relentless attacks directed against the agency, conceal a very different reality.
When compared to other federal law enforcement agencies, the ATF consistently ranks as the smallest and most poorly funded. Its annual appropriations have grown more slowly than any other federal law enforcement agency. Charged with monitoring the more than 80,000 licensed U.S. gun dealers, the ATF barely has the personnel to conduct routine dealer inspections once every 10 years, not to mention the ATF's obligation to inspect the nation's 9,000 explosives license holders.
The agency is even barred by law from computerizing its records. Background checks are still conducted by hand at a national tracing center in Martinsburg, W.V., where the sheer weight of its paper records nearly caused the building in which they are housed to collapse in 2019. Routine gun traces can take two weeks.
And far from being a rogue or out-of-control agency, a 2021 investigation by The Trace found that the ATF's dealer monitoring 'has been largely toothless and conciliatory, bending over backward to go easy on wayward dealers.' In fact, it found that gun dealers were 'largely immune from serious punishment and enjoy layers of protection unavailable to most other industries.'
Now the Trump administration is moving ahead to fire two-thirds of the 800 ATF personnel charged with monitoring gun dealers' compliance with federal law, to cut the agency's $1.6 billion budget by a third, to weaken or eliminate more than 50 existing rules and regulations and to refocus its resources on immigration. While most gun dealers ply their trade honestly, some have been found to flout the law consistently. In 2023, the ATF reported 93 gun dealers that willfully violated federal law. The ongoing evisceration of the ATF's monitoring abilities will have a predictable result of more dealers selling guns to those who shouldn't have them.
After all, why should someone bent on obtaining guns for illicit purposes bother with an unpredictable and dangerous black market, the risks of gun theft or other unreliable secondary sources when anyone can more or less put down money at a gun shop and walk off with firearms, no questions asked?
As for ghost guns, law enforcement agencies across the country have reported that they are increasingly being used in crimes. From 2017 to 2023, the number of ghost guns found at crime scenes skyrocketed from 1,629 to 27,490. With the end of efforts to serialize guns and parts, expect that number to keep rising, frustrating efforts to solve gun-related crimes. The abandonment of this initiative raises a question without an obvious answer: Why would any law-abiding citizen want a gun that cannot be traced?
The protection of gun rights has nothing to do with feeding gun-fueled criminality. From America's very earliest days, governmental leaders enacted a wide array of laws to keep guns away from those considered a threat to public safety, including extensive use of gun licensing dating back centuries.
The Trump administration now seems bent on rejecting one of our country's longest, oldest and most important legal and political traditions: protecting its citizens from criminality, violence and threats to public safety.
Robert J. Spitzer is Distinguished Service Professor emeritus of political science at SUNY Cortland, and an adjunct professor at the College of William and Mary School of Law. He is the author of six books on gun policy, including 'The Gun Dilemma' and the ninth edition of 'The Politics of Gun Control.'