Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Mark Wilson/Getty Images, Getty Images Plus, and Library of Congress.
This is part of Amicus and Slate’s “By the People” series, which explores how the American people can reclaim the Constitution—and the law—from this monarchical Supreme Court.
In
1991, former Chief Justice Warren Burger renounced the then-nascent
push to reinterpret the Second Amendment as an individual right to bear
arms. Appearing on PBS NewsHour, the conservative jurist condemned this campaign as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud,
on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen
in my lifetime.” Burger, a Richard Nixon appointee, was no outlier:
Across the partisan spectrum, leading constitutional lawyers agreed that
the Constitution did not create a personal right to possess guns. A
year earlier, Erwin Griswold, solicitor general for Presidents Lyndon B.
Johnson and Richard Nixon, said that the pro-gun argument “exceeds the
limits of principled advocacy.” Shortly before that, the far-right Judge
Robert Bork—formerly Nixon’s solicitor general and attorney
general—said that the Second Amendment protects state militias, not
individuals. Bork, whose own nomination for the Supreme Court was
famously defeated over his extreme right-wing views, deemed all state
gun restrictions “probably constitutional.”
Less than 20 years later, the Supreme Court announced in D.C. v. Hellerthat
Burger, Bork, and their contemporaries had it all wrong: The Second
Amendment had guaranteed an individual right to bear arms the whole
time. Of course, the constitutional text remained the same. What changed
was the nation’s understanding of it. Over decades, gun rights
activists transformed a position dismissed by Burger and Bork into a
cornerstone of conservative constitutional identity. They built a
political movement around their ahistorical, atextual interpretation.
Buoyed by lavish funding from the industries that stood to benefit,
these activists elected lawmakers who embraced their view, then elevated
judges who would translate it into law. By the time Heller
reached the Supreme Court, the individual-right theory did not appear
radical to the conservative majority. It looked inevitable.
Second Amendment advocates like to frame Heller as a triumph of originalism, and SCOTUS certainly sold it that way. But in truth, it is popular constitutionalism all the way down. Yale Law professor Reva Siegel laid out this fact in a renowned law review article
months after the decision came down, and her observation has only grown
more prescient with time. The Republican-appointed supermajority has
spent the past four years steadily expanding the right it created in
2008, to the point that it now deemsall restrictions on “armed self-defense” to be “presumptively unconstitutional.” Under Heller and its progeny, courts have struck down state laws that ban guns from zoos, libraries, and museums; that prohibit the removal of serial numbers from weapons; and that outlaw machine guns. SCOTUS has struggled to keep pace with the revolution that it unleashed and has sometimes seemed embarrassed by the consequences of its own rulings.
The
modern Second Amendment has thus become both a paragon of popular
constitutionalism and its own dark mirror. Gun rights advocates followed
much of the popcon playbook, but never truly built majority support for their broader aims: Many of their legal demands today—like unlicensed public carry and easy access to assault weapons—are unpopularwith the broader public.
It seems fair to say that the average American who wants to keep a
handgun at home did not sign up for unpermitted open carry of an AR-15
at the zoo. Heller is not just a case study in popular
constitutionalism; it is also a warning that industry-backed interest
groups can mimic a mass movement, then leverage it to create a
constitutional right that extends far beyond anything the citizenry ever
demanded.
Siegel’s
early account of the Second Amendment’s rise remains unimpeachable as a
straightforward chronicle of how moneyed interests can manufacture
constitutional meaning. Beginning in the 1970s, insurgents within the
National Rifle Association transformed the former sporting organization
into an aggressive political machine. The reconstituted NRA began
proclaiming that the Constitution bestowed a personal right to possess
firearms, a notion that the Supreme Court had never come close to
endorsing. It cultivated a disciplined cadre of activists who mobilized
to warn “law-abiding citizens” that they needed a gun to defend their
families against criminals. And it pushed lawmakers to dismantle
firearms restrictions while punishing politicians who strayed from the
cause.
At
the same time, the gun lobby forced its way into the emerging “New
Right” coalition. Conservative lawmakers commissioned dubious historical
reports
declaring that the framers had enshrined an individual right to bear
arms. Republican presidents elevated sympathetic judges to the bench.
All the while, NRA-backed advocates seeded the legal academywith bogus scholarship
that supplied the movement with an originalist pedigree. Arguments that
Burger and Bork dismissed as fringe advocacy became orthodox within
conservative legal circles. Through these tactics, the gun movement
fused with the Republican Party, and allegiance to an expansive Second
Amendment became a litmus test for both the legal and political arms of
the GOP.
By the time Heller
reached the Supreme Court, then, the gun lobby had positioned every
piece for checkmate. So many states had repealed so many firearm
regulations that the District of Columbia’s stringent handgun ban looked
like a true outlier. Public support for a total ban on handguns in the
home had plummeted. Justice Antonin Scalia was able to frame his
majority opinion as the vindication of a right so obvious that virtually
the entire country already recognized it to some degree. He relied upon
NRA-backed pseudo-scholarship to disregard the Second Amendment’s first
clause (which links it to state militia service) then recast the right
“to keep and bear arms” as a core component of personal liberty. And he
rooted his holding in the alleged “original meaning” of the amendment
through analysis that appeared to be steeped in historical texts.
In fact, many of Scalia’s historical claims in Heller have since beendebunkedby real historians.
But even in 2008, any keen observer could see that the Supreme Court
was not actually uncovering a right buried since 1791; it was ratifying a
constitutional forgery that decades of well-funded lobbying had passed
off as an ancient truth. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss Heller as nothing more than an astroturfed simulation of popular constitutionalism. By the time it came down, Gallup found that 3 in 4 Americans
believed that the Second Amendment bestowed an individual right to own a
firearm. They overwhelmingly opposed total handgun bans—even though a
supermajority of Americans wanted such bans in 1960.
The gun lobby really had built public support for its revisionist
reading of the Constitution. It had, in every sense, changed
constitutional meaning through popular ratification.
But
the limits of this consensus were already beginning to show. The same
Gallup poll that showed supermajority support for handgun ownership
found that 49 percent of Americans favored stricter gun laws, while just
11 percent preferred looser ones. Heller marked the
culmination of one campaign that most of the country had rallied behind,
but the beginning of another that it largely opposed: a broader legal
assault on all manner of gun safety legislation. Most Americans, for
instance, still favor stricter gun laws overall, including assault weapon bans, a higher minimum age for ownership, waiting periods between purchases, and states’ authority to require a special need
before granting a public-carry permit. In recent years, federal courts
have struck down all of these policies (though some were reversed on
appeal). These rulings carried Heller way beyond public
consensus, shedding the skin of popular constitutionalism to reveal a
project of minority rule by judicial fiat.
What
lesson should progressive proponents of popcon take from this
trajectory? The most obvious takeaway is that, even if they refuse to
admit it, conservatives relied on the same tried-and-true strategies as
history’s great civil rights movements to elevate their conception of
the Second Amendment into constitutional law. They did so because those
strategies work. Defenders of Heller simply have no
standing to mock the left for building constitutional meaning through
mass mobilization when their own movement perfected the art.
The deeper lesson, though, is that a constitutional right’s popular origins do not guarantee a democratic afterlife. While Heller
was built on phony history, it reflected a genuine, hard-fought shift
in public understanding. But once an unelected judiciary took up the
cause, the citizenry lost its power to define and limit the Second
Amendment through the usual machinery of representative self-government.
It became a weapon for the juristocracy to wield against communities seeking to protect themselves from the bloody epidemic of gun violence.
The hazard exposed by Heller
is not merely that conservatives can practice popular
constitutionalism, too; it’s that judges can capture popcon’s victories
and weaponize them against democracy itself. An idea that mutates from a
“fraud” to a precedent in less than two decades can metastasize into
something much more dangerous than the public ever supported.
Progressives must remember that the fight for constitutional meaning
cannot end the moment a movement secures five votes at the Supreme
Court. A whole new battle begins when the court claims the victory as
its own.
If the
pointless war on Iran is a historical marker equivalent to Suez in
ignominy, the question becomes, what do we do with this “Decline of
Empire” moment?
Thousands
of people gather at Revolution Square to protest the attacks launched
by the US and Israel on Iran, in Tehran, Iran, on May 30, 2026.(Fatemeh Bahrami / Anadolu via Getty Images)
Flash
back to the boastful, triumphalist 1990s, as in Madeleine Albright’s
telling Matt Lauer in 1998, “If we have to use force, it is because we
are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see
further than other countries into the future.” Well, goodbye to all
that. The United States is now enduring a singular humiliation akin to
that Britain and France suffered 70 years ago in the Suez Crisis. That
event, little-remembered here but iconic for the rest of the world,
signaled the end of old-style European imperialism. In its wake arrived
something new, the Americans’ vast “empire of liberty” constrained only
by the Soviet Union’s upstart “empire of justice,” as Odd Arne Westad
put it in his now-classic The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2006).
Following Tehran’s systematic checkmating of US authority, only an
ostrich could deny our decline as a Great Power. Unless you are like
Trump and his minions, who think history stops at our shores, the fall
of the American imperium was preordained. Sooner or later, other nations
would innovate, expand, recover from defeat—but not this soon, most of
us thought! Even 50 years ago, while it was regaining strategic
equilibrium after the disaster in Vietnam, it was self-evident that the
United States would never regain its dominance circa 1945, when we had a
majority of the world’s industrial capacity, a nuclear monopoly, and
the only globe-spanning naval and air forces, plus the legitimacy
granted by defeating fascism and creating the United Nations.
Nonetheless, from 1991 to 2016, various Bushes, Clintons, and Obama
still hailed US preeminence. That’s gone for good. The myth of the sole
superpower has been blown to bits by cheap Iranian drones, and no one
buys it anymore. Not the Gulf satrapies whose security we guaranteed,
not the European Union, warily gearing up for war over Greenland—not
anyone anywhere.
For me, the augury came in 2010. For many years, I taught how in a
single generation, 1870–1900, the United States outstripped Great
Britain, the fabled “workshop of the world,” in the key markers of
industrial capacity—coal, iron, and steel. Twenty years ago, China had
been rapidly moving ahead and then it happened: In 2010, their
state-directed economy surged past ours. Now it is China that beats its
three rivals combined (the United States, Germany, and Japan) in
manufacturing output. Still, I presumed a long, slow draw-down of US
power in the emerging multipolar world where America still waved the
biggest stick.
Here is where the
metaphor of “Suez” comes in. That word has no meaning to Americans, but
in Europe, in particular the United Kingdom, it is a trope as powerful
as “Vietnam” here, a single word conveying loss, hubris, humiliation,
and failure. Why?
For 90
minutes, the World Cup gives us something the genocide has tried to take
away: a sense of community, a sense of normality, and a moment of pure
celebration.
As
unprecedented US sanctions push Cuba deeper into crisis, Havana is
embracing sweeping market reforms while insisting it is not abandoning
socialism.
Pete Hegseth speaking at the American military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer on Saturday. Photograph: Jeremías González/AP
Pete Hegseth’s D-day speech on immigration condemned as ‘grotesque stupidity’
Historians and campaigners accuse US defence secretary of desecrating memory of soldiers who fell in Normandy
The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth,
has been accused by historians and rights campaigners of “grotesque
stupidity” and desecrating the memory of the soldiers who stormed the
beaches of Normandy after he sought to link immigration to the D-day
anniversary, saying Europe was facing a different “invasion” of its
shores.
Speaking in north-west France on
Saturday to mark the 82nd anniversary of the D-day landings, Hegseth
seized on the moment marking the wartime liberation of Europe to reiterate the US administration’s longstanding attack on European immigration policies.
ProPublica is a nonprofit, investigative newsroom that exposes
corruption. We report in all 50 states and partner with local newsrooms. Our work spurs real-world impact and has received numerous awards, including nine Pulitzer Prizes.
Collage by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source images: Bloomberg/Getty
Images, Firearm Transaction Record Form via U.S. Department of Justice
and Alec MacGillis/ProPublica.
“No One Is Watching”: How Trump Reversed Biden’s Crackdown on Gun Trafficking
Less Gun Enforcement: The ATF referred 30% fewer
gun-trafficking charges during Trump’s first year than the year prior.
The number of referrals prosecutors declined also rose.
ATF to ICE: Large numbers of ATF agents have been
shifted from enforcing gun laws to helping ICE in its campaigns against
undocumented immigrants.
Undoing a Crackdown: Trump has reversed a Biden-era
crackdown on gun stores that violate the law. There has been a 69%
reduction in the number of dealers losing their licenses.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
Marianna Mitchem grew up in the Denver suburbs, where she played high
school soccer. One day in April 1999, her team faced off against a
nearby rival, Columbine High. The next day, two teenagers went on a
shooting rampage at Columbine, killing more than a dozen people.
The massacre left an imprint on Mitchem. After graduating from
Providence College, she joined the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms
and Explosives. “Fearing for my friends and watching what was happening —
you don’t forget things like that,” she told me. “I wanted to make a
difference.”
She started in the ATF’s Denver office as an industry operations
investigator, the bureau’s term for inspectors who ensure that firearms
dealers are conducting the required background checks on buyers and
maintaining sales records. When the bureau found discrepancies, it
tended to settle for reprimands and improvement plans, rarely going so far as to revoke a dealer’s license.
In 2021, things started to change. The country was experiencing a
surge of deadly violence, with homicides up more than a third since
2019, and the administration of President Joe Biden was desperate to
reverse the trend. For years, data had shown that a large share of guns
used in shootings came from a small fraction of dealers, and that guns
that were trafficked — sold by stores to straw purchasers (people other
than the intended users) or resold on the street — were far more likely to be used in shootings.
Acting on this data, the administration in June 2021 announced what
became known as “zero tolerance”: Dealers found to be willfully
violating the law would lose their licenses, period. Revocations spiked,
from fewer than 50 in 2019, 2020 and 2021 to a record 181 in 2023.
Also in 2021, Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, started
urging federal prosecutors to prioritize gun violence. A year later,
Congress passed a law that added a firearms trafficking conspiracy
charge to the federal criminal code, a crucial new tool for prosecutors.
After 2021, the homicide rate started falling, which criminologists
attributed to several factors, including repair of the social fabric
since the coronavirus pandemic and a closing of the breach in
police-community relations that followed the 2020 murder of George
Floyd. One other factor got less attention: the clampdown on the illegal
flow of firearms.
The Biden administration struggled to broadcast its gains on public
safety, and Donald Trump won the election in 2024 partly by vowing to
restore order. By the time Trump reentered the White House, Mitchem had
risen to associate assistant director for industry operations,
overseeing inspectors across the country. “We were making incredible
progress on trafficking, on violent crime,” she said late last year.
But the Trump administration, driven both by gun-lobby advocacy and
its own political priorities, quickly set about undoing much of its
predecessor’s moves to combat gun violence. It repealed the
zero-tolerance policy, going so far as to invite revoked dealers to
reapply for new licenses. It shifted hundreds of ATF agents to
immigration work. And it scaled back on prosecutions for gun
trafficking. The White House declined to comment, referring questions to
the ATF and the Department of Justice.
The homicide rate fell further last year, but criminologists warn
against complacency, because the illicit gun trade is a classic pipeline
problem: The harm can take a while to make itself felt. Research has found
that the typical “time to crime” for trafficked firearms ranges up to
about three years, which means that any positive lag of the
anti-trafficking efforts of the Biden years would still be in effect
now, with any negative effects of the Trump pullback lying in the years
to come.
Among those now sounding the alarm is Mitchem. Dismayed at the policy
reversal, she left the ATF last spring, after 21 years, and joined
Everytown, the gun-safety group founded by Michael Bloomberg.
“Just because no one is watching the trafficking pipelines right now
doesn’t mean guns aren’t flowing through it. It just means they’re not
being intercepted,” she told me.
“And as you walk away from that, and you don’t have your focus on
that anymore,” she added, “that pipeline is going to be flowing, and we
are going to start to see the violent crime impact from that over time.”
Estimates put the number of guns in the United States at close to 400 million,
but the odds that any of them will be put to ill use rise exponentially
if they are obtained illegally. Of the 2.3 million firearms traced from
crime scenes between 2017 and 2023, half were bought less than three
years earlier and 87% were recovered in possession of someone other than
the original, legally authorized buyer. Over that period, stores sold
almost 1.3 million guns to traffickers that were subsequently recovered
in a crime, according to an Everytown analysis of ATF statistics.
This is why the laws governing gun sales carry such high stakes for
public safety. But enforcement of these laws has long occupied an
unusual no-man’s-land in this country, scrambling the standard political
lines around criminal justice. Conservatives favoring tough-on-crime
rhetoric are frequently torn when it comes to firearms trafficking: On
the one hand, traffickers are helping fuel the violent crime that
conservatives decry; on the other, prosecution of gun laws brushes
against tenets that conservatives hold sacrosanct. It is liberals who
are more likely to push for tougher enforcement, though they can be
conflicted, too, as their belief in stricter gun laws runs up against a
general preference for a less punitive approach to lawbreaking.
Marooned in this no-man’s-land for decades now has been the agency
assigned the task of enforcing federal gun laws, the ATF. Going back to
an episode at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, where an ATF investigation of
illegal gun dealing led to federal agents killing the wife and son of a
white separatist, the ATF has been viewed with scorn by people who
otherwise might side with armed government authorities. “ATF IS GAY”
read the T-shirt worn by one attendee of a big gun show I attended
earlier this year in Manassas, Virginia.
The agency’s radioactivity with the gun-rights lobby has left it on
shaky political ground. It went seven years without a Senate-confirmed
director. Its budget has not enjoyed the same expansion as that of other
federal law enforcement agencies. And stringent laws constrain any ATF
capabilities viewed as potentially threatening the rights of gun owners.
To comply with a 1986 law preventing the creation of a federal gun
registry, for example, the ATF uses software with some features
disabled. Steve Dettelbach, who served as director under Biden, joked in
a 2024 congressional hearing that the ATF might be “the only customer
of Adobe Acrobat that pays money to remove search function.”
Despite these constraints, the ATF has developed its investigative
capability. In the 1990s, the agency started sharing with local law
enforcement agencies its National Integrated Ballistic Information
Network, which collects the unique marks on bullet casings found at
shooting scenes. The system has become much more potent as it became
easier to share large numbers of images from crime scenes rapidly and
compare them against the NIBIN database. The work was boosted further by
the creation, starting in 2016, of 25 crime gun intelligence centers to
process the data.
Given that a tiny share of the nation’s guns are used in shootings,
with many of those used multiple times, the leads produced by the
technology can have an outsized impact, said Daryl McCormick, who
retired last year as special agent in charge of Ohio and southern
Indiana. “It’s crazy how it might spiderweb out,” he told me, “because
you have a gun that’s used in three shootings, but in one of those three
shootings, there’s a guy that’s linked to three more shootings.”
Starting in the spring of 2020, that technology was put to the test. As homicides rose sharply, so did sales at dealerships. By one estimate,
there were 3 million more guns sold between that March and July than
would have been expected. Many soon turned up in shootings; the number
of guns recovered at crime scenes that had been bought from a dealership
less than a year earlier, an especially strong indicator of firearms
trafficking, jumped by nearly a third from 2019 to 2021.
Meanwhile, many shootings involved ghost guns assembled from kits,
which had begun proliferating a few years prior. Amid other factors
driving the killing, the sheer plenitude of weaponry on the streets was
pivotal, said Daniel Webster, a gun-violence researcher at Johns Hopkins
University. “We know,” he told me, “that a small number of dealers can
create a substantial amount of harm, and traffickers as well.”
In the spring of 2021, a 25-year-old man was summoned to help a
friend in a confrontation at a low-income housing development in
Middletown, Connecticut. It was a petty beef arising from disrespectful
comments made to someone’s girlfriend, but Tylon Hardy responded anyway.
“He was one of the guys who wanted to protect his community,” his
sister, Tianna Hardy, told me later. “He showed up to protect his
friend.” After he arrived, Tylon was fatally shot in the back.
A photo of Tylon Hardy in his sister’s house. He was fatally shot in Middletown, Connecticut.Jarod Lew for ProPublica
Guns are tightly regulated in Connecticut, where buyers must first
obtain a permit. But this gun had not been sold by a Connecticut store.
It had been purchased six days earlier at Smokin’ Barrel Guns and Ammo
in Raleigh, North Carolina, more than 600 miles away.
It was a particularly rapid movement up the Iron Pipeline, the name
for the trafficking channel from southern states with lax gun laws to
northern states with stricter ones. And it turned into a clear example
of why trafficking enforcement matters. Investigators obtained camera
footage from the shop showing a young man emerging after buying the gun,
a Taurus 9 mm pistol, to make a call on his cellphone.
The following spring, the Biden-nominated U.S. attorney for the
Eastern District of North Carolina, Michael Easley Jr., produced
indictments in the case that started with the camera: Four people were
charged with having engaged in a conspiracy to traffic dozens of guns
from shops in eastern and central North Carolina. All told, the
ringleader had bought more than 100 guns from straw purchasers in North
Carolina; 10 of the guns surfaced at crime scenes in Connecticut and New
Jersey. The ringleader ended up pleading guilty and being sentenced to
more than 10 years in prison; the other three received sentences ranging
from 18 months to five years.
Tianna Hardy’s brother, Tylon, was shot with a trafficked gun from North Carolina.Jarod Lew for ProPublica
Easley kept pursuing trafficking cases, poring over spreadsheets full
of NIBIN data showing information for every gun traced from shootings
in his district. His office would zero in on guns with a short “time to
crime” from the initial sale and see if investigators could build leads
from purchase records. His team made its interest in trafficking plain
to the local ATF division, motivating agents to build cases.
“Prosecutors have the ability to send a demand signal to the marketplace
of agents, that we have an interest in these and if you bring us the
cases, we will push them over the end zone and get convictions,” he told
me.
Prosecutors kept getting more encouragement from Washington. In April
2022, the ATF issued a rule decreeing that ghost guns had to conform to
the same regulations as regular firearms, including carrying serial
numbers and requiring background checks.
Two months later, Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act,
which got crucial Republican backing from North Carolina Sen. Thom
Tillis. In addition to the new trafficking conspiracy charge, the law
included a new straw-purchasing charge, expanded background checks for
buyers under 21 and funding for states with red-flag laws permitting gun
confiscations from those judged dangerous. And a month after that, the
Senate confirmed Dettelbach, giving the ATF its first confirmed director
since 2015, one who had prosecuted gun crimes as U.S. attorney for the
Northern District of Ohio.
Across the country, federal prosecutors took on trafficking cases
with gusto. Over the remainder of Biden’s term, they charged more than
500 defendants using the new trafficking statutes; others brought cases
using laws already on the books.
In Ohio, McCormick and his ATF colleagues took on a sprawling case
that started with a shooting with a machine gun in Avondale, outside
Cincinnati, and led to a six-year prison sentence for a 24-year-old man
who had made and sold over 80 machine-gun conversion devices; two other
men who trafficked the devices to Cincinnati gangs were sentenced to
nine and 11 years. As in North Carolina, the Ohio agents were getting
encouragement from prosecutors, including Kenneth Parker, the then-U.S.
attorney for the Southern District of Ohio. “I made it clear, through my
edicts, my announcements to them that we wanted those cases involving
violence, that they know how seriously we were taking them,” he told me.
In February, I drove to Raleigh to meet with Easley and visit Smokin’
Barrel — or what used to be Smokin’ Barrel. The shop closed after the
ATF revoked its license in early 2023, not for having sold the gun in
the Connecticut case, but for an earlier incident, in which the owner
sold a gun to an 18-year-old woman, in violation of North Carolina’s
21-year age minimum for buying a handgun. The shop, a small outbuilding
adjacent to a used car lot, now sat empty; its fading sign still stood
roadside.
Not far away, I found the former owner, Richard Humphries, at his
home. He told me how upset he still was over the revocation, especially
since, he said, he had self-reported the improper sale.
When I asked him about the Taurus that ended up being used six days
later in the Connecticut killing, he initially had trouble recalling it,
confusing it with another case in which a man had used a gun bought at
the store to kill his wife. What was it like to learn about shootings
with the guns he sold? “I hate it,” he said. “I hate that I sold it and
he might have used it, but there’s nothing I can, you know …” He trailed
off.
I pointed out that in the Connecticut case, investigators had been
able to uncover the trafficking ring after tracing the gun to his shop.
Was that a good use of resources? “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, they need to
be able to do that. But they just, you know, they need to pay more
attention to the crooks than people trying to make an honest living.”
I heard similar complaints from other dealers who had their licenses
revoked during Biden’s term for transgressions they insisted were mere
clerical mistakes. One in Indiana told me that his violations included a
mix-up involving an Amish customer’s name; one in South Carolina told
me his violations included filling out forms on behalf of elderly
customers with shaky handwriting. “If it had been six months earlier,
they would have given us a slap on the hand,” he said.
Even some within the ATF had misgivings, worrying that the policy
would strain the agency’s relations with law-abiding dealers and make
them less likely to offer alerts on suspicious behavior by buyers. “The
industry is probably one of the best ways we get information about
trafficking,” McCormick, the retired Ohio agent, told me. “But if
there’s friction between us and the industry, they’re less likely to
report it.”
Gun-safety advocates discounted that risk, saying the policy had both
shut down many lawless stores and encouraged countless other sellers to
make sure they were complying with the law. “It’s not only targeting
bad dealers but sending a message to the entire industry: button up,”
Josh Scharff, general counsel of Brady United, told me.
In 2024, revocations rose yet further,
to 183. This represented a mere sliver of dealers — only 2% of those
inspected that year — but it provoked new ire, not only from traditional
lobby groups such as the National Shooting Sports Foundation and
National Rifle Association but from ascendant groups of gun owners with
even more aggressively anti-regulation stances.
Some dealers challenged their revocations in federal court. In 2023,
the ATF revoked the license of a shop in the Phoenix suburbs, Chambered
Group, after four inspections in five years turned up a host of
violations. The business sought unsuccessfully to block the revocation
in court, with a federal judge, Steven Logan, finding that the business
had “purposefully disregarded [federal] regulations by repeatedly
violating the same regulations despite being given multiple
opportunities to cure its mistakes.” In 2024, one of the shop’s
co-owners tried to get a new license under a slightly different name,
Chambered Custom Firearms, and the ATF blocked him, noting his past role
with the revoked store. (A lawyer for the shop declined to comment.)
But after Trump returned to the White House, his administration
announced an end to the zero-tolerance policy, urged revoked dealers to
reapply and started settling the court cases, one after another. In
April 2025, the DOJ informed the court that it had started settlement
talks in the Arizona case and a month later alerted it that Chambered
Custom had submitted a new application “which ATF will expeditiously
process.” It issued the license in July.
In Oregon, a dealer had gone to federal court to challenge the ATF’s
2024 denial of his license renewal for South Valley Firearms in the town
of Monroe due to his past conviction for domestic violence. Trump’s DOJ
initially contested the dealer’s bid, but early this year, the
department notified his attorney out of the blue that his client would
be getting his license, after all. “They didn’t give any explanation as
to why,” said the lawyer, Leonard Williamson. “They just said, ‘Have him
resubmit his application and we’ll give it to him.’”
The end of zero-tolerance was, on its own, hardly a surprise for an
administration elected with the strong support of gun-rights and
gun-industry groups. What has differed from the first Trump term has
been the wholesale shift of resources away from the enforcement of gun
trafficking laws and toward the immigration crackdown, both at the ATF
and DOJ.
Last spring, the administration began shifting large numbers of ATF
agents to a new assignment: assisting with Immigration and Customs
Enforcement actions against undocumented immigrants. ICE records obtained by the libertarian Cato Institute in September showed that nearly 1,800 of ATF’s roughly 2,500 agents had taken part in enforcement and removal operations.
While ATF agents were shifted to immigration operations, criminal
referrals fell. ATF referrals for common trafficking-related charges,
including the two added in the 2022 law, decreased 15% in 2025 from
2024, according to a ProPublica analysis. Asked about the drop, ATF
spokesperson Tanya Roman pointed at DOJ prosecutors. “Not every ATF
referral is accepted by the [United States Attorney’s Office] for
prosecution,” she said in a written response to questions.
Eventually, the shift toward immigration enforcement reached even
beyond ATF’s agents to the industry operations investigators who inspect
dealers. Terrence Robinson had served in that role for six years, based
in Baltimore. He took pride in the work, but soon after Trump’s second
term began, Robinson realized it would be a turbulent year for his
agency. As part of the push by Elon Musk’s Department of Government
Efficiency to shrink the government, the ATF offered early retirement to
many of its 800-odd inspectors. In the end, some 125 took the offer,
threatening to overburden a corps already struggling to inspect even a
sliver of the nation’s 130,000 licensed firearms dealers. “ATF does not
comment on personnel matters,” Roman said.
Around the same time, Robinson went to inspect the location of an
applicant for a dealership license in Baltimore. The city, long wracked
by gun violence, has come to have virtually no licensed dealers within
its boundaries; those that remain are mostly in the suburbs. Robinson
was startled to discover that this applicant intended to sell guns from
his apartment in a building downtown, a few blocks from Camden Yards.
Robinson voiced his concerns to his supervisor, who told him that he had
to approve it. “According to our rules and regulations now, he passed a
criminal background check, and he’s a citizen, so …,” Robinson said.
“It’s mind-boggling.”
Most upsetting, though, was the directive that he and other industry
operations investigators received in late summer to start spending at
least six hours per week on immigration-related work. It was hard to
understand what this even meant — their job was to inspect firearms
dealers. To comply, he began scouring dealers’ sales records looking for
buyers with foreign-sounding names, which were then relayed to the
Department of Homeland Security. This struck him as a monumental misuse
of resources.
This was what pushed him over the edge and made him decide to take
early retirement, too, in September. “I didn’t sign up to be an
immigration person,” he said. “I’m just not that.”
Asked about such orders, the ATF’s Roman said: “In support of
President Trump’s whole of government approach to combat illegal
immigration, ATF is assisting the Department of Homeland Security and
other federal law enforcement partners with their immigration
enforcement efforts. To ensure operational security and the safety of
our agents and partners, ATF does not disclose details or specific
numbers of personnel deployments or enforcement activities.”
Now that Robinson was gone, his former team was down from 10 to six,
with a temporary supervisor. He worried what the changes at ATF meant
for public safety. “I’m not saying I can see the future, but I don’t see
things getting better,” he said. “I see things getting worse.”
Terrence
Robinson served as an inspector at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives for six years in Baltimore. The directive that
he and other industry operations investigators received in late summer
was to start spending at least six hours per week on immigration-related
work. This was what pushed him over the edge and made him decide to
take early retirement. “I didn’t sign up to be an immigration person,”
he said. “I’m just not that.”KT Kanazawich for ProPublica
“Everyone’s been in a little bit of shock about what’s going on,”
Marianna Mitchem said last December, speaking from the stage of a
conference on gun violence at the Center for American Progress, the
center-left think tank in Washington. She described what the ATF had
accomplished in recent years, then she laid bare the extent of the
pullback now underway.
Mitchem told the advocates that they would have to look to officials
in their home states and cities to try to fill the void left by the
Trump administration. “It’s up to the states to start tackling this
trafficking problem, because unfortunately, you’re not going to have the
support of the ATF,” she said.
This has already started happening in a few places. In the suburbs of Philadelphia, a city that suffered one of the worst pandemic-era homicide spikes but has since experienced dramatic improvement, county sheriffs have started
doing more inspections of dealers to make up for the decline in ATF
enforcement. A member of the conference audience asked Mitchem what else
states could be doing to respond. Her answer suggested she wasn’t sure.
“ATF wasn’t always the most widely known agency. I think we sort of
liked it that way. We did really, really good work and kept our head
down,” she said. “And so now, you’re trying to let everybody know,
unfortunately, there are still good people there, but they’ve been
redirected.”
In February, Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, Robert Cekada, downplayed that redirection at his confirmation hearing.
Cekada is a 20-year ATF veteran, a fact in which gun-safety advocates
have tried to take some reassurance. Cekada testified that the agency
was continuing to “do dealer inspections uninhibited.”
But ATF has made it much harder for researchers and the public to
track that work. It took the administration more than 15 months to release a tally of how many dealer licenses it had revoked: 56 in 2025, down 69% from the year before. Cekada also challenged a report last fall
that 80% of the ATF’s agents had been reassigned to immigration
enforcement. The reassignment had never amounted to more than 100 agents
at a given time, Cekada said. “ATF in those operations has been focused
on offenders that were illegally armed with firearms,” he told
senators.
But as the former federal prosecutors and ATF agents I spoke with
noted, the key question when it comes to the fight against trafficking
is whether prosecutors are seeking out cases. After all, the ATF
investigates cases, but U.S. attorneys prosecute them. And here the
evidence suggests a pullback. A ProPublica analysis shows that in the
first year of the Trump administration, the DOJ declined 30% more
referrals from the ATF for the main trafficking-related charges than it
had the year prior.
Despite the high rate of declinations for ATF referrals, the DOJ last
year ended up prosecuting nearly as many gun-trafficking cases from all
sources as it had in 2024. But a growing share of the cases, roughly
30%, were under the new trafficking conspiracy charges included in the
2022 law, which since its inception has proven especially useful in
cases involving gun trafficking across the Mexican border: About a fifth
of all people charged under that law over the course of 2024 and 2025
are in a single district, western Texas. Asked about the rise in
declinations of ATF referrals and the shift toward border-related cases,
DOJ spokesperson Katie Kenlein said, “The department declines to
comment on prosecutorial strategy.”
Webster, the Johns Hopkins researcher, said numbers leave little
doubt as to the shift away from general anti-trafficking enforcement.
“Everything is diverted,” he said. “It’s all about immigrants.”
On April 29, right after being confirmed as ATF director, Cekada announced 34 proposed rule changes, including
requiring dealers to hold records for only 20 or 30 years, not
indefinitely, and limiting ATF scrutiny of the state-issued permits that
can replace background checks for buyers. “We are proposing to remove
unnecessary hurdles that were standing in the way of law-abiding
citizens and businesses,” he said, flanked by leaders of the NRA and
National Shooting Sports Foundation.
One crucial Biden-era reform has persisted: the clampdown on ghost
guns. The 2022 ATF regulation survived a Supreme Court challenge last
year, and lawsuits by several cities helped drive the leading producer of ghost guns out of business.
Webster and other criminologists note that the reduced flow of ghost
guns correlates with a sharply lower rate of shootings by teenagers, who
had been heavy users of the guns during the 2020-21 homicide surge.
Even that progress seemed as if it might be at risk. In early April, a
joint status report issued to the federal court in Texas where the case
originated stated that “ATF has advised that it plans to take agency
action to amend the challenged rule” (even though the rule has been
upheld by the Supreme Court). A day later, the White House’s 2027 budget
called for reversing “the imposition of excessive restrictions on
homemade firearms.” But five days after that, the DOJ notified the court in the Texas case
that “the government has decided to maintain the definition” that
underlies the ghost gun rule. Asked for clarification, the ATF’s Roman
said last week: “ATF is still conducting legal reviews for other, more
technically challenging rules. If changes are needed following the
review, a proposal will be published.” For now, one key valve in the
pipeline remains closed.
