Trump ATF Rolls Back Three Dozen Gun Rules It Concedes Could Produce Mass Casualty Events, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Federal Regulation Still Stood Between Americans And Their Firearms

WASHINGTON. Acting on a presidential order to reexamine the nation's firearm rules, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives this week unveiled nearly three dozen final and proposed regulations that would let Americans mail handguns to one another, scrap a Biden-era rule expanding background checks at gun shows, and make it considerably harder to revoke a dealer's license, resolving the long-standing concern that federal regulation still stood between law-abiding Americans and the firearms they wished to buy, transport, and ship.

The package, which the gun industry's leading trade group welcomed as "the dawning of a new era," rolls back rules issued under the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and clears the way for the Postal Service to carry pistols under the same terms as rifles and shotguns, after the Justice Department concluded that a roughly century-old prohibition on mailing handguns was unconstitutional. Other measures would ease the interstate transport of firearms and remove a requirement that licensed sellers hand buyers a youth handgun safety notice.

In one proposed rule narrowing the definition of who is too mentally unfit to own a gun, the agency acknowledged in writing that the resulting risk "may be minimal, or may be considerably greater (up to and including potential mass casualty events)," a sentence the ATF drafted, reviewed, and advanced toward finalization without removing it.

"The repeal of the regulation has no effect on the scope of the law, and signals that ATF will abide by the laws enacted by Congress," an agency spokesperson said, noting that the changes followed the President's directive and were not made to please the gun lobby, whose representatives were present in the room when the rollbacks were announced.

The rulemaking arrives as the Justice Department moves to shrink the corps of inspectors who monitor licensed dealers, a parallel effort that officials have described as part of a broader modernization. Sources within the administration characterized the package not as a loosening of oversight but as a restoration, returning to Americans a set of freedoms that earlier administrations had, in their telling, quietly confiscated through paperwork.

At press time, the administration had clarified that the new rules merely permitted what was previously forbidden, and that anything Americans chose to do with that permission would henceforth be a matter for state and local authorities to address.