It was 92 years ago when Congress, motivated by Prohibition-era gun violence and the attempted assassination of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, passed the National Firearms Act, which, among other things, made it more difficult to buy silencers, short-barreled rifles and short-barreled shotguns. It remained intact — and wasn’t especially controversial — for generations.
Nevertheless, U.S. District Court Judge James Wesley Hendrix, a Trump appointee, gutted the law last week, and this week, the Republican administration decided not to appeal the ruling. The New York Times reported:
The Justice Department declined to appeal a court ruling that effectively dismantled longstanding restrictions on owning short-barreled guns and suppressors, bowing to pressure from Republicans and gun advocates.
Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas had said that his order striking down the mandated permitting process under the National Firearms Act as unconstitutional would go into effect Thursday unless the Justice Department appealed it. Trump administration officials didn’t file an appeal to the court before 12:01 a.m. Thursday, according to publicly available court records.
So it was up to Trump’s Justice Department to appeal the ruling and to keep the status quo in place while the process played out. Instead, the DOJ decided not to bother, allowing the ruling to take effect (at least for now).
In a written statement, the Justice Department said it “respects Americans’ Second Amendment rights and is currently assessing the impact of the court’s ruling.”
Three of the nation’s leading organizations in support of gun safeguards, Giffords, Everytown for Gun Safety and Brady, wasted little time in denouncing the administration’s move.
“Today, our government is failing us. At midnight, uniquely lethal weapons and devices — including silencers, short-barreled rifles, and shotguns — were deregulated for the first time in nearly a century,” Brady President Kris Brown said in a statement. “The Department of Justice had the opportunity to act to protect our safety, but it failed to do so. … Today, the gun industry and silencer dealers are celebrating, while Americans are left less safe.”
It’s worth emphasizing that Attorney General Todd Blanche, as part of his recent confirmation process, was specifically asked whether he believed the National Firearms Act should be repealed or weakened. “I defer to the measured judgment of Congress on whether the NFA should be repealed or weakened,” he told senators as part of his written response. “The Department’s duty is to defend the constitutionality of the laws passed by this body.”
Then the Justice Department he ostensibly leads decided not to defend the constitutionality of the law passed by Congress.
This was the latest in a series of related steps for the Republican administration. It was just last month when Team Trump also scrapped dozens of firearm safeguards, including restoring gun rights to some people with mental illness. A few months before that the administration announced a sweeping rollback of other gun safeguards, including rescinding the Biden-era policy that ended the so-called gun show loophole.
That came on the heels of Trump’s Justice Department announcing it no longer intended to enforce a federal ban on mailing handguns through the U.S. Postal Service that was first approved 99 years ago.
Months earlier, the New York Times reported that the department had also decided to slash the number of inspectors who monitor federally licensed gun dealers by two-thirds, “sharply limiting the government’s already crimped capacity to identify businesses that sell guns to criminals.”
The month before that, the Trump administration decided it would permit the sale of “forced reset triggers,” which can turn semiautomatic weapons into guns that can fire more bullets, more quickly and easily. (Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi said the move would “enhance public safety,” which seemed to turn reality on its head.)
Alas, we can keep going. After the 2022 massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, there was bipartisan support for significant new investments in improving mental health support for students as part of an effort to lessen the likelihood of future mass shootings. The Trump administration, however, decided to block $1 billion in grants for student mental health programs, concluding that the programs to reduce gun violence in schools were no longer in “the best interest of the federal government.”
A week before these revelations came to light, The Washington Post reported that Trump’s DOJ had canceled hundreds of grants to community organizations and local governments, “including funding for gun-violence prevention programs.”
On gun policy, President Donald Trump wasn’t nearly this regressive. In fact, in 2018, the president went so far as to suggest he was comfortable with some extrajudicial gun confiscations and a new assault weapons ban. In his second term, the Republican and his administration have moved aggressively in the opposite direction.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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