Tracking Trump’s Disastrous Record on Guns

Which makes sense—he was president during some of the worst mass shootings in American history, while gun homicides skyrocketed, and when guns became the number one killer of children.

We’ll also be tracking what he does—and doesn’t do—during the next four years. After all, he’s already bragged about doing nothing on guns, told the NRA that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms,” and promised to roll back Biden-era gun safety measures. GIFFORDS is going to be fighting back each and every step of the way—and we’ll keep this page updated as his second term unfolds.

On May 16, the Trump administration agreed to a settlement that requires the Department of Justice to “not enforce the machine gun ban against any device that functions like a forced reset trigger.” 

Forced reset triggers are designed to drastically increase a firearm’s rate of fire by mechanically resetting the trigger after each shot instead of relying on the shooter’s release. The result is a firing rate nearly identical to a machine gun. 

With this settlement, Trump has once again proven that he cares about gun lobby profits over American lives. These devices have no explicit age restrictions and are not subject to any specific design standards or permitting requirements. Gun manufacturers may even start pre-installing FRTs at the point of sale. In other words, across most of the country, there is little to prevent the proliferation of what are effectively machine guns.

Last April at the ATF headquarters in DC, then ATF Director Steve Dettelbach created a memorial to remind employees of the human toll of gun violence. The memorial featured photos of police officers killed by gunfire, children slain in mass shootings at Sandy Hook and Parkland, and other victims.

Now, the Trump administration has removed the memorial and the portraits of victims hung in the ATF building’s atrium. This is just the latest insensitive step by Trump officials to cover up and ignore the impact of gun violence across America. Americans, especially victims and survivors, deserve more respect than this administration is willing to give them—and GIFFORDS will continue fighting to save lives and raising the alarm when the administration puts us all at risk.

The Trump administration wants to cut funding for several of the Justice Department’s law enforcement offices in its latest budget proposal. This would include a more than $400 million cut to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)—that, if enacted, would be the agency’s lowest budget since at least 2016. There would also be millions of dollars worth of cuts to the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI.

If this proposed budget is passed by Congress, it will undoubtedly hamper the ATF’s ability to carry out the Trump administration’s “mission” to crack down on violent crime.

After the horrific school shooting in Uvalde in 2022, Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Republican leaders worked side by side with Democrats to ensure this bill would fund, among other things, mental health resources for schools across the country. Now, the Trump administration has rescinded these crucial grants.

These cuts only serve to hurt our kids and make them less safe at school. Mental health support is a key tool in addressing this nation’s gun violence epidemic. Access to resources like psychologists, counselors, and mental health workers is crucial to improve student outcomes, prevent gun violence, and fight America’s school shooting epidemic. Removing these popular, bipartisan resources is dangerous, and will cost students their lives.

The Trump administration abruptly rescinded millions of dollars of grants to local gun violence prevention and crime reduction programs, as well as domestic violence assistance programs and drug addiction intervention programs. This decision reverses years of strategic investment in evidence-informed and community-rooted responses to violence, trauma, and addiction, and it has destabilized the many community-based ecosystems of violence prevention. Programs were halted midstream and vital supports ceased immediately, leaving important programs, work, organizations, research, and more without funding or contingency plans. 

The administration claimed grants were terminated in part because they want to focus on “protecting American children.” Yet the leading cause of death of American children is gun violence, which these programs target and reduce. Brave intervention workers help bring down violent crime rates and ensure more young people make it home safe each night, and law enforcement benefits greatly when these efforts are part of a coordinated, comprehensive strategy. Community violence intervention has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with the hard work of stopping community violence before it escalates and people get killed. There is no valid justification for cutting off lifesaving services.

In a memo to Department of Justice employees, Trump—through his Attorney General Pam Bondi—announced a Second Amendment Enforcement Task Force to “protect” the Second Amendment rights of Americans. In the memo, Bondi stated that the Second Amendment has been treated as a “second-class right” for too long, and that the task force would develop and execute strategies “to advance, protect, and promote compliance with the Second Amendment.”

In February, Trump issued an executive order regarding guns. He called on the attorney general to “examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies” from President Biden’s term and come up with a plan to undo them—under the guise of “protecting” the Second Amendment.

The first step of this executive order was announced on April 7, when Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the reversal of the ATF’s zero tolerance policy. The critical policy had revoked the licenses of gun dealers who willfully broke the law and was a powerful tool for combating gun trafficking and straw purchasing. Repealing this rule only benefits two parties: The gun sellers knowingly endangering communities and the gun CEOs getting rich off of weapons sales to criminals—not the American people.

At the beginning of April, the Trump administration, including our new Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., began cutting staff from vital programs across the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Among those programs targeted includes the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which oversees the CDC’s gun violence and suicide prevention programs. 

Instead of doing anything to help protect American kids from gun violence and crime, Trump created a new Tesla task force—full of FBI and ATF agents—to respond to approximately 48 instances of vandalism of Tesla vehicles and charging stations across the country. 

Meanwhile, our country continues to struggle with a raging gun violence epidemic. 

In an alarming move, Trump is considering merging the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Cutting resources from the ATF—which is what this merger would likely do—would effectively defund the police, weakening efforts to stop gun traffickers, straw purchasers, and gun dealers who are breaking the law. 

This move would also limit the power of both agencies, and would represent one of the biggest shakeups of American federal law enforcement agencies since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2011. 

Without a public announcement, the Trump administration updated the ATF’s “Leadership” webpage to feature FBI Director Kash Patel as acting director of the ATF. In fact, Patel’s close friends at the fringe organization Gun Owners of America first noted the change. 

The administration likely chose to keep this decision under the radar because Patel has no experience fighting crime, preventing mass shootings, or stopping domestic terrorism—making him a terrible leader of the only federal law enforcement agency whose sole mission is to fight violent crime. 

But on April 9, it was reported that Patel was removed from his ATF position and replaced with US Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll. Notably, Driscoll also already has an important, full-time job running the US Army. Stopping violent crime at the ATF is not a part-time job, and he will likely face the same issues Patel faced when appointed acting director. This agency deserves full-time leadership and the resources necessary to save lives from gun violence.

In some of his first moves back in office, Trump nominated Kash Patel to be director of the FBI and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Patel is an unprecedented threat to public safety and the integrity of federal law enforcement: He has ties to extreme groups like QAnon and Gun Owners of America, and he has zero experience in public safety. Patel is uniquely unqualified to oversee the FBI, which requires experienced leadership and a commitment to protecting all Americans.

RFK Jr. is similarly unqualified to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He stated that, despite the facts, he does not believe gun violence is a public health crisis, nor does he believe that researching gun violence is important. He is clearly unfit to protect the health and safety of Americans, and he jeopardizes public safety.

However, in the Republican-controlled Senate, both Patel and RFK Jr. were confirmed to their respective positions. 

After a shooter murdered 17 people—and injured 17 more—at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, Parkland victims’ families pushed for the creation of a government effort to ensure research on school safety was easy for educators and the public to navigate. In response, the Trump administration created the Federal School Safety Clearinghouse, an interagency effort to share resources and best practices related to school safety. But now, Trump is betraying the Parkland victims’ families and their tireless advocacy. He disbanded this crucial resource, effectively choosing the gun lobby’s will over student safety. 

In the first week of his second term, Trump and his administration decided to lend agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to “help carry out deportations.” This decision further weakens an already stretched workforce tasked with protecting Americans by fighting gun crime and completely misses the point: A central cause of immigration driving the border crisis is gun violence, fueled by guns trafficked from the US into Mexico and Latin America.

Almost immediately into Trump’s new term, the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention was removed from the White House webpage. While there was no official announcement of the closure from the administration, it hasn’t operated since Trump took office. 

While the office operated, it helped coordinate federal response efforts to mass shootings and community gun violence, worked directly with state and local partners to help reduce gun violence, and helped implement the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and executive actions on gun safety. The creation of this office by President Biden was a huge win for the gun violence prevention movement, which spent years pushing for federal resources to fight this crisis. 

However, it seems that Trump is following through on his promise to get rid of all gun safety measures enacted by Biden.

The Gun Control Act of 1968 declares that if a would-be gun buyer is legally considered a “fugitive from justice,” a gun dealer can’t sell a gun to that person. For the purposes of this law, the FBI considered anyone with an outstanding warrant to be a fugitive. In 2017, however, under Trump’s direction the FBI drastically narrowed the category of people who are legally barred from purchasing guns by declaring that only people who have crossed state lines to avoid prosecution are fugitives. He then purged 500,000 records from the federal background check system that identified fugitives who had been flagged as prohibited from purchasing guns.

In 2017, a shooter used assault weapons and bump stocks—which allow a semiautomatic weapon to fire as quickly as an automatic—to carry out the worst mass shooting in modern American history at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas. In response, Trump instructed the ATF to ban bump stocks, taking surprise action on gun safety. The ATF then proposed and published a rule categorizing guns with bump stocks as machine guns, making them illegal under federal law.

By doing so, however, he played right into the gun lobby’s hands. Some Republicans were reluctant for Congress to pass a law, despite bipartisan support to do so, because of opposition from far-right groups like Gun Owners for America and because laws are notoriously hard to repeal. Instead, they wanted temporary cover and praise for taking action after a horrific mass shooting without having to take an actual vote on gun legislation. After all, it was only a matter of time—perhaps due to their prodding—that the right-wing Supreme Court would take up and possibly reverse this ATF rule.

In 2024, the Supreme Court did just that—it recklessly undid this lifesaving ban and allowed automatic weapons back into civilian life, a decision that Trump quickly accepted. 

After the mass shooting in Parkland in 2018, Trump attended a listening session with teachers and students where he promised to take strong action on background checks. In fact, he told a room of lawmakers “You’re scared of the NRA” during a televised meeting as he called for a comprehensive gun safety bill—one that included background checks and raising the age limit to buy assault rifles. Of course, he swiftly walked back his support for the latter after meeting privately with NRA officials.

Democrats took control of the House in 2019 and quickly passed both the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, which would expand federal background checks, and the Enhanced Background Checks Act of 2019, which would close the Charleston Loophole and extend the window for completing a background check from three to 10 days. Instead of following through on his promise, however, Trump threatened to veto these bills if they passed the Senate. 

Just months later, Americans watched mass shootings claim the lives of 32 people in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, leaving dozens more injured. Trump once again reversed his position on background checks, calling for strong legislation to address the issue—but offered no details on whether he’d veto similar bills to what had already been proposed.

The most enduring legacy of Trump’s first—and possibly second—term will be just how many judges he appointed to lifetime positions. We’ve already seen the detrimental impact of these appointees, who have set significant legal precedents on gun and Second Amendment cases as well as many other life-or-death issues. 

In fact, in 2022 the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen, which announced a radical—and illogical—new framework for evaluating Second Amendment challenges, was only possible because of Trump’s picks for the Supreme Court. This decision immediately caused a wave of gun lobby challenges on gun laws nationwide, allowing ideologically driven judges to weaponize Bruen to strike down long-standing gun laws—which was always the plan. 

In 2017, Trump became the first sitting president in more than 30 years to speak at the NRA’s annual convention. To no one’s surprise, he thanked the lobbying group for its $30 million in campaign contributions, saying, “You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you.” In 2018, shortly after he promised to take action on guns in wake of the Parkland shooting, he spoke at its annual convention once again—walking back his promise and declaring that “your Second Amendment rights are under siege, but they will never ever be under siege as long as I am your president.” And in 2019, amidst the infighting amongst leadership of the NRA, Trump called himself a champion of gun rights and used his speech as an opportunity to pull out of an international arms treaty. 

In 2015, the Obama administration sued the ghost gun company Defense Distributed for publishing its blueprints for 3D-printed guns online. It argued that by doing so, Defense Distributed was facilitating the creation of dangerous ghost guns, which are typically undetectable and untraceable. Both a district and appellate court sided with the administration. 

Fortunately, the Biden administration took executive action to stem the flow of ghost guns into communities, including having ATF finalize a rule defining weapon parts kits as firearms and therefore making them subject to the same regulations—including serializing the parts and conducting background checks for every sale. This rule is being reviewed by the Supreme Court, and a decision is expected later this year.