Justice Department rolls back gun rules, launches Second Amendment Task Force

The Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives widened their rollback of federal gun rules on Wednesday, announcing 34 notices of final and proposed rulemaking meant to ease compliance for gun owners and firearms businesses while narrowing the government’s enforcement reach.

The package follows President Donald Trump’s February 7, 2025 executive order directing the attorney general to review firearms-related actions taken from January 2021 through January 2025 under Executive Order 14206, Protecting Second Amendment Rights. Since then, the department has been dismantling pieces of the Biden-era framework that gave regulators more leverage over dealers and certain weapons classifications.

On April 7, 2025, DOJ and ATF repealed the Enhanced Regulatory Enforcement Policy, known as the Zero Tolerance policy, which had been used to crack down on federal firearms licensees during inspections. The same day, the agencies began reviewing Final Rule 2021R-08F on stabilizing braces and Final Rule 2022R-17F on who is considered engaged in the business of selling firearms. Those two rules sit at the center of federal oversight: the brace rule affected how certain firearms were classified, while the dealer-definition rule shaped when a person crossed the line from private sales into regulated business activity.

The practical effect of the rollback is clear. Dealers facing inspection now have less exposure to automatic or near-automatic license revocation under the zero-tolerance framework, and the government has fewer immediate tools to force compliance through the licensing system. That could make it harder for regulators to police repeat paperwork failures and other violations before they ripple into wider tracing and recordkeeping problems. It also signals a shift away from treating regulatory errors as a gateway to stronger federal action against the firearm supply chain.

Attorney General Pamela Bondi said on April 9, 2025, that she had created a 2nd Amendment Task Force at the Justice Department to combine policy and litigation resources behind Trump’s pro-gun agenda. The department said the new approach is aimed at willful violators and criminal actors rather than inadvertent compliance mistakes by responsible owners and licensees.

The rollback has continued into 2026. In February, DOJ’s Office of the Pardon Attorney said it had published a proposed rule that would allow some people to regain federal firearm rights under 18 U.S.C. 925(c), with an online application to follow after a final rule is issued. The 34 new notices released Wednesday are part of the broader review, and comment periods on the proposals will generally remain open for 90 days after publication, setting up another round of legal and regulatory fights over how far the federal government should pull back from gun oversight.