An ATF police officer holds a police line, Friday, Aug 22, 2025, on H Street in northeast Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson) In response to President Trump’s executive order Protecting Second Amendment Rights, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives proposed an extensive regulatory reform package. It aims to reduce burdens on law-abiding citizens and businesses and clarify confusing requirements.
Several proposals have attracted significant attention, and most coverage has inaccurately portrayed the scope and intent of the rules. The public deserves a clear statement of the facts.
First, much of this package updates rules and procedures that in some cases haven’t been revised in decades. It also aligns agency practice with recent court decisions. Having clear, updated rules would prevent abusive enforcement practices — for example, shutting down legitimate firearms businesses for minor clerical infractions, which occurred during the prior administration — and allow ATF to focus attention where it belongs: fighting violent crime.
One often misrepresented proposed rule seeks to address what criteria disqualify someone from firearm ownership based on mental illness. When Congress passed the Gun Control Act in 1968, the law affected a narrow category describing people with severe, permanent intellectual disabilities — not the roughly one in five American adults diagnosed with some mental health condition each year.
Despite that narrow intent, the definition was broadened in the 1990s. For instance, if the Department of Veterans Affairs appointed a fiduciary to help a veteran manage benefit payments, that veteran was to be disarmed, even absent any other functional impairment. Over 200,000 veterans lost their firearm rights this way.
A similar problem existed at the Social Security Administration, resulting in the disarming of retirees and those receiving disability payments.
Congress stopped the agencies from continuing this practice. ATF’s new proposal brings the regulatory definition in line with that congressional judgment. Those who require guardianship due to mental illness or intellectual disability, and anyone committed to a mental institution, would still be prohibited from owning guns. Those who simply need help managing government benefit payments would not.
Coverage has falsely claimed that ATF was arming the mentally ill, and that our own analysis shows that this rule will lead to a mass-casualty event. In truth, ATF’s cost-benefit analysis did note that the risk “may be minimal, or may be considerably greater, up to and including mass-casualty events.” Disclosing the full range of costs and benefits, including even remote scenarios, is standard regulatory practice.
This is exactly why the comment period exists. Each rule must be looked at in full. Any effort to extract speculative scenarios out of context risks misleading the public.
A second proposal concerns online firearm sales. Congress authorized in-state, non-over-the-counter sales in 1968, subject to strict conditions: The dealer must be located in the same state as the buyer, the dealer must provide notice to the buyer’s local police chief and then the dealer must wait seven days before delivering the firearm. ATF’s regulations, updated in the 1990s after the Brady Act, assumed identity verification could only happen in person. But with secure ID verification technology, nearly all transactions requiring identification have moved online.
Somehave inaccurately described this as weakening background checks or being done to benefit a particular business interest. All false. ATF has had no engagement with any retailer in developing it and has proposed a process that would strengthen safeguards.
Every transaction under the rule would still require the same background check as an in-person sale. But they would additionally require notice to local law enforcement, a seven-day waiting period and a two-step identity verification process. This includes live videoconferencing for facial comparison and an ID validity check through a separate federally approved service provider. A buyer would prove their identity twice, through two independent channels, rather than once to a store clerk.
Other inaccurate claims suggest the proposal would let domestic abusers or violent criminals obtain firearms without a background check. It would not. No proposed rule touches the federal categories of prohibited persons, and every covered transaction still requires a background check. Dealers also retain their existing obligation to flag bulk buys, repeated purchases of identical firearms and other sales that indicate possible trafficking.
Separately, the notion that ATF’s proposal to repeal the Engaged in the Business rule is gutting background checks is also false. In the 2024 rule, the previous administration expanded the definition of who qualifies as a licensed dealer, effectively broadening background checks by administrative regulation. Not only has a federal judge fully vacated the rule nationwide, arguing that it was legally flawed, but ATF’s analysis determined that the rule not only failed to increase the number of background checks conducted or federal licensees, but actually decreased the number of licensee applications.
Having served 34 years in law enforcement, under many political administrations, I am confident that these reforms will reduce unnecessary burdens on law-abiding citizens and businesses while preserving — and sometimes enhancing — safeguards. I encourage anyone with questions to read the rule and raise them during the comment period, which closes on most of these proposals early this month.
Streamlining the regulatory system without weakening any actual safeguard is good government, and the public is better served by an accurate account of what the ATF is doing than an alarmed one.
Rob Cekada is director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
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