


WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is expected to roll back a range of Biden-era gun control measures, including a program to crack down on federally licensed gun dealers who falsify business records and skip customer background checks, according to two people briefed on the move.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, under pressure from gun rights groups, is likely to announce this week that she plans to eliminate the “zero tolerance” policy, put in place four years ago, that strips the federal licenses of firearms dealers found to have repeatedly violated federal laws and regulations, the people said.
Bondi plans to order FBI Director Kash Patel, who is also the interim leader of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, to review two other major policies enacted under the Biden administration, with an eye toward scrapping both.
One is a ban on so-called pistol braces used to convert handguns into rifle-like weapons, and the second is a rule requiring background checks on private gun sales.
The moves come at a moment of chaos at a largely leaderless ATF, whose small workforce has been partly redeployed to provide support for immigration raids around the country.
Patel has spent most of his time running the FBI, and the Justice Department has proposed merging the gun agency with the Drug Enforcement Administration, a plan that has left the ATF’s career leadership demoralized. That, however, is unlikely to take place anytime soon.
President Donald Trump campaigned on curtailing gun regulations.
In February, he signed an executive order directing the Justice Department “to examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans” and other actions “to assess any ongoing infringements” of Second Amendment rights.
In late March, Bondi ordered the department’s civil rights division to open an investigation into the potential infringement of Second Amendment rights by officials in Los Angeles County, repurposing an investigative unit that had been used to expose racial discrimination and police violence by local enforcement agencies.
Enforcement of the zero tolerance policy has waned somewhat since Trump was elected. And federal judges have already frozen all or part of the rule involving pistol braces as well as the regulation imposing background checks on a shadow market of weapons sold online, at gun shows and through private sellers.
Taken together, the new moves represent a U-turn from efforts by the Biden administration, led by the former ATF director, Steven Dettelbach, to stem the flood of unregulated semiautomatic handguns and rifles that have contributed to mass shootings and exacerbated the violent crime wave that peaked after the coronavirus pandemic.
“This administration inherited a violent crime rate at a 50-year-low — less than three months later they are now looking to roll back popular gun safety policies that keep communities safe,” said John Feinblatt, head of Everytown for Gun Safety.