‘Nobody’s looking’: How Trump reversed Biden’s gun crackdown

Marianna Mitchem grew up in the suburbs of Denver, where she played high school football. One day in April 1999, his team faced a close rival, Columbine High. The next day, two teenagers went on a rampage at Columbine, killing more than a dozen people.

The massacre left an imprint on Mitchem. After graduating from Providence College, she joined the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “Fearing for my friends and watching what’s happening, you don’t forget things like that,” she told me. “I wanted to make a difference.”

She started in the ATF’s Denver office as an industrial operations investigator, the bureau’s term for inspectors who ensure gun dealers conduct required background checks on buyers and maintain sales records. When the office found discrepancies, it tended to settle for reprimands and improvement plans, rarely goes that far regarding the revocation of a dealer’s permit.

In 2021, things started to change. The country was facing a surge in deadly violence, with homicides up more than a third since 2019, and President Joe Biden’s administration was desperate to reverse the trend. For years, data showed that a large share of guns used in shootings came from a small fraction of dealers, and that guns that were trafficked – sold by stores to straw buyers (people other than the intended users) or resold on the street – were much more likely to be used in gunfights.

Building on this data, the administration announced in June 2021 what became known as “zero tolerance”: Dealers who deliberately break the law would lose their licenses, period. Revocations have increased from fewer than 50 in 2019, 2020 and 2021 to a record 181 in 2023.

Also in 2021, Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland began urging federal prosecutors to prioritize gun violence. A year later, Congress passed a law that added a gun trafficking conspiracy charge to the federal criminal code, a crucial new tool for prosecutors.

After 2021, the homicide rate began to decline, which criminologists attribute to several factors, including repairing the social fabric since the coronavirus pandemic and closing the breach in police-community relations that followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Another factor has received less attention: crackdowns on the illegal flow of guns.

The Biden administration has struggled to publicize its public safety gains, and Donald Trump won the 2024 election in part by pledging to restore order. By the time Trump returned to the White House, Mitchem had become associate deputy director for industrial operations, overseeing inspectors across the country. “We were making incredible progress in the fight against trafficking and violent crime,” she said late last year.

But the Trump administration, motivated both by the gun lobby and its own policy priorities, quickly moved to reverse much of its predecessor’s measures to combat gun violence. It repealed the zero-tolerance policy, going so far as to invite revoked dealers to reapply for a new license. Hundreds of ATF agents were assigned to immigration work. And he reduced prosecutions for gun trafficking. The White House declined to comment, referring questions to the ATF and the Justice Department.

The homicide rate fell again last year, but criminologists warn against complacency because the illicit gun trade is a classic problem: the damage can take some time to be felt. The research found that the typical “time to crime” for gun trafficking varies by up to about three years, meaning that any positive lag in anti-trafficking efforts from the Biden years would still be in effect today, and the negative effects of Trump’s withdrawal would be in future years.

Among those sounding the alarm is Mitchem. Dismayed by the policy reversal, she left the ATF last spring, after 21 years, and joined Everytown, the gun safety group founded by Michael Bloomberg.

“Just because no one is monitoring the trafficking pipelines right now doesn’t mean guns aren’t flowing through them. It just means they aren’t being intercepted,” she told me.

“And as you move away from that, and as you stop focusing on that,” she added, “that pipeline is going to flow, and we’re going to start to see the impact of that on violent crime over time.”

Estimates put the number of firearms in the United States at nearly 400 millionbut the chances of any of them being misused increases exponentially if obtained illegally. Of the 2.3 million firearms traced to crime scenes between 2017 and 2023, half were purchased less than three years earlier and 87% were found in the possession of someone other than the original legally authorized purchaser. During that time, stores sold nearly 1.3 million firearms to dealers, which were then recovered in a crime, according to one report. Analysis of each city of ATF Statistics.

This is why the laws governing the sale of weapons have such important public safety issues. But enforcement of these laws has long occupied an unusual no-man’s land in this country, blurring the usual political lines around criminal justice. Conservatives who favor a tough-on-crime narrative are often torn when it comes to gun trafficking: on the one hand, traffickers help fuel the violent crimes that conservatives denounce; on the other, the pursuit of gun laws runs counter to principles that conservatives consider sacrosanct. It is liberals who are most likely to push for stricter enforcement, although they may also be conflicted, as their belief in stricter gun laws clashes with a general preference for a less punitive approach to lawbreaking.

The ATF, the agency responsible for enforcing federal gun laws, has been abandoned in this no-man’s land for decades. Dating back to an episode in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, where an ATF investigation into illegal arms trafficking led federal agents to kill the wife and son of a white separatist, the ATF was viewed with contempt by people who might otherwise side with armed government authorities. “ATF IS GAY” read the T-shirt worn by an attendee at a large gun show I attended earlier this year in Manassas, Virginia.

The agency’s radioactivity with the gun rights lobby has left it on shaky political ground. It lasted seven years without a Senate-confirmed director. Its budget has not enjoyed the same expansion as that of other federal law enforcement agencies. And strict laws limit the ATF’s capabilities seen as potentially threatening to gun owners’ rights. For example, to comply with a 1986 law preventing the creation of a federal gun registry, the ATF uses software that has some features disabled. Steve Dettelbach, who served as director under Biden, joked at a 2024 congressional hearing that the ATF might be “the only Adobe Acrobat customer that pays money to remove the search function.”

Despite these constraints, the ATF has developed its investigative capacity. In the 1990s, the agency began sharing with local law enforcement its Integrated National Ballistics Information Network, which collects unique markings on bullet casings found at shooting scenes. The system has become much more powerful as it has become easier to quickly share large numbers of crime scene images and compare them to the NIBIN database. The work was further strengthened by the creation, from 2016, of 25 criminal weapons intelligence centers to process the data.

Because a tiny fraction of the nation’s guns are used in shootings, and many of them are used multiple times, the pellets produced by the technology can have an outsized impact, said Daryl McCormick, who retired last year as special agent in charge of Ohio and southern Indiana. “It’s crazy how big a cobweb can appear,” he told me, “because you have a gun that’s been used in three shootings, but in one of those three shootings there’s a guy who’s connected to three other shootings.”

As of spring 2020, this technology has been put to the test. As homicides have risen sharply, sales at dealerships have also increased. By an estimatethere were 3 million more guns sold between March and July than expected. Many quickly found themselves in gunfights; the number of guns found at crime scenes and purchased from a dealer less than a year earlier, a particularly strong indicator of gun trafficking, jumped by almost a third from 2019 to 2021.

During this time, many shootings involved ghost guns assembled from kits, which had begun to proliferate a few years earlier. Among other factors leading to the killings, the multitude of weapons on the streets played a crucial role, said Daniel Webster, a gun violence researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “We know,” he told me, “that a small number of dealers can create considerable harm, just like traffickers. »

In the spring of 2021, a 25-year-old man was summoned to help a friend during a confrontation in a low-income housing development in Middletown, Connecticut. It was a small argument stemming from disrespectful comments made to someone’s girlfriend, but Tylon Hardy responded anyway. “He was one of those people who wanted to protect his community,” his sister, Tianna Hardy, later told me. “He showed up to protect his friend.” After arriving, Tylon was fatally shot in the back.

Firearms are strictly regulated in Connecticut, where buyers must first obtain a permit. But this gun had not been sold in a store in Connecticut. It had been purchased six days earlier at Smokin’ Barrel Guns and Ammo in Raleigh, North Carolina, more than 600 miles away.

It was a particularly rapid movement along the Iron Pipeline, the name given to the trafficking channel from southern states with lax gun laws to northern states with stricter laws. And this has become a clear example of the importance of combating trafficking. Investigators obtained camera footage from the store showing a young man walking out after purchasing the weapon, a Taurus 9mm pistol, to make a call on his cell phone.

The following spring, the Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, Michael Easley Jr., presented indictments in the case that began on camera: Four people were accused of engaging in a conspiracy to traffic dozens of guns into stores in eastern and central North Carolina. In total, the ringleader had purchased more than 100 firearms from straw buyers in North Carolina; Ten of the guns surfaced at crime scenes in Connecticut and New Jersey. The ringleader eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison; the other three were sentenced to terms ranging from 18 months to five years.

Easley continued to handle traffic cases, reviewing spreadsheets filled with NIBIN data showing information on every gun traced to shootings in his district. His office would focus on guns with a short “time to crime” from the initial sale and see if investigators could establish leads from purchase records. His team made its interest in trafficking clear to the local ATF division, motivating agents to build cases. Prosec “Twists” have the ability to send a signal of demand to the agent market that we are interested in them and that if you submit the files to us, we will push them beyond the end zone and get convictions,” he told me.

Prosecutors have received increasing encouragement from Washington. In April 2022, the ATF issued a rule decreeing that ghost guns must comply with the same regulations as regular firearms, including carrying serial numbers and requiring background checks.

Two months later, Biden signed the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which gained crucial Republican support from North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis. In addition to the new trafficking conspiracy charge, the law included a new straw purchase charge, expanded background checks for buyers under 21, and funding for states with whistleblower laws allowing confiscation of firearms from those deemed dangerous. And a month later, the Senate confirmed Dettelbach, giving the ATF its first confirmed director since 2015, one who had prosecuted gun crimes as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio.

Across the country, federal prosecutors have taken up trafficking cases with enthusiasm. During the remainder of Biden’s term, they indicted more than 500 defendants using the new trafficking laws; others sued using laws already in place.

In Ohio, McCormick and his ATF colleagues undertook a sprawling affair it began with a machine gun shootout in Avondale, outside Cincinnati, and led to a six-year prison sentence for a 24-year-old man who made and sold more than 80 machine gun conversion devices; two other men who sold the devices to Cincinnati gangs were sentenced to nine and 11 years in prison. As in North Carolina, Ohio agents received encouragement from prosecutors, including Kenneth Parker, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio. “I made it clear, through my executive orders and my announcements, that we wanted these cases involving violence, that they knew how seriously we took them,” he told me.

In February, I went to Raleigh to meet Easley and visit Smokin’ Barrel – or what used to be Smokin’ Barrel. The store closed after the ATF revoked its license in early 2023, not for selling the gun in the Connecticut case, but for an earlier incident, in which the owner sold a gun to an 18-year-old woman, in violation of North Carolina’s minimum age of 21 to purchase a handgun. The store, a small outbuilding adjacent to a used car lot, was now empty; its faded sign was still present at the side of the road.

Not far from there, I found the former owner, Richard Humphries, at his home. He told me how upset he was still about the revocation, especially since, he said, he himself had reported the irregular sale.

When I asked him about the Taurus that ended up being used six days later in the Connecticut murder, he initially had trouble remembering it, confusing it with another case in which a man used a store-bought gun to kill his wife. What was it like learning about the shootings with the guns he was selling? “I hate it,” he said. “I hate that I sold it and he may have used it, but there’s nothing I can do, you know…” He trailed off.

I pointed out that in the Connecticut case, investigators were able to uncover the trafficking network after tracing the gun to its store. Was it a good use of resources? “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, they have to be able to do it. But they just have to, you know, pay more attention to the scammers than to the people who are trying to make an honest living.”

I’ve heard similar complaints from other dealerships whose licenses were revoked during Biden’s term for transgressions that they say were simple clerical errors. Someone in Indiana told me his violations included a mix-up involving an Amish customer’s name; a man in South Carolina told me his violations included filling out forms on behalf of elderly clients with shaky handwriting. “If it had been six months earlier, they would have given us a slap on the wrist,” he said.

Even some within the ATF had reservations, fearing that the policy would strain the agency’s relationships with law-abiding dealers and make them less likely to offer alerts about suspicious buyer behavior. “The industry is probably one of the best ways to get traffic information,” McCormick, the retired Ohio agent, told me. “But if there’s friction between us and the industry, they’re less likely to report it.”

Gun safety advocates dismissed that risk, saying the policy had both shut down many illegal stores and encouraged countless other sellers to make sure they followed the law. “It’s not just about targeting bad dealers, but also sending a message to the entire industry: Shut up,” Josh Scharff, general counsel for Brady United, told me.

In 2024, revocations increased even moreat 183. That represented only a small number of dealers — just 2 percent of those inspected that year — but it provoked new anger, not only from traditional lobbying groups such as the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the National Rifle Association, but also from ascendant groups of gun owners with even more aggressive anti-regulation positions.

Some dealers challenged their revocation in federal court. In 2023, the ATF revoked the license of a suburban Phoenix store, Chambered Group, after four inspections in five years found numerous violations. The company unsuccessfully tried to block the revocation in court, with federal judge Steven Logan ruling that the company had “deliberately ignored [federal] regulations by repeatedly violating the same regulations despite multiple opportunities to correct its errors. In 2024, one of the store’s co-owners attempted to obtain a new license under a slightly different name, Chambered Custom Firearms, and the ATF blocked it, pointing to his past role with the revoked store. (A lawyer for the store declined to comment.)

But after Trump returned to the White House, his administration announced an end to the zero-tolerance policy, urged revoked dealers to reapply and began settling court cases, one after another. In April 2025, the DOJ informed the court that it had begun settlement negotiations in the Arizona case and alerted it a month later that Chambered Custom had submitted a new request “which the ATF will process expeditiously.” He issued the license in July.

In Oregon, a dealer had gone to federal court to challenge the ATF’s 2024 refusal to renew his license for South Valley Firearms in the town of Monroe because of his prior domestic violence conviction. Trump’s DOJ initially challenged the dealership’s offer, but earlier this year the department informed its lawyer out of the blue that its client would get his license after all. “They gave no explanation as to why,” attorney Leonard Williamson said. “They just said, ‘Have him resubmit his application and we’ll give it to him.’ »

The end of zero tolerance was, in itself, hardly a surprise to an administration elected with the strong support of gun rights groups and the gun industry. What differs from Trump’s first term is the massive shift of resources from gun enforcement to immigration enforcement, both within the ATF and the DOJ.

Last spring, the administration began assigning large numbers of ATF agents to a new mission: helping with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s actions against undocumented immigrants. ICE records obtained by the libertarian Cato Institute in September showed that nearly 1,800 of the ATF’s approximately 2,500 agents took part in the enforcement and deportation operations.

As ATF agents were assigned to immigration operations, criminal reports declined. ATF referrals for common trafficking-related charges, including the two added in the 2022 law, decreased 15% in 2025 compared to 2024, according to a ProPublica analysis. Asked about the decline, ATF spokeswoman Tanya Roman pointed the finger at DOJ prosecutors. “Not all ATF references are accepted by the [United States Attorney’s Office] prosecutions,” she stated in a written response to questions.

Eventually, the shift toward immigration enforcement extended even beyond ATF agents to industrial operations investigators who inspect dealerships. Terrence Robinson had held this position for six years, based in Baltimore. He took pride in his work, but soon after Trump’s second term began, Robinson realized it would be a turbulent year for his agency. As part of efforts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to shrink government, the ATF has offered early retirement to many of its roughly 800 inspectors. Ultimately, some 125 people took the offer, threatening to overburden a body already struggling to inspect even a small number of the nation’s 130,000 licensed firearms dealers. “The ATF does not comment on personnel matters,” Roman said.

Around the same time, Robinson went to inspect the location of a dealer license applicant in Baltimore. The city, long ravaged by armed violence, practically no longer has any authorized dealers on its territory; those who remain are mostly in the suburbs. Robinson was surprised to discover that this plaintiff intended to sell guns from his apartment in a downtown apartment building, a few blocks from Camden Yards. Robinson raised his concerns with his supervisor, who told him he had to approve it. “Under our current rules and regulations, he has passed a criminal background check and he is a citizen, so…” Robinson said. “It’s mind-boggling.”

Most upsetting, however, was the directive he and other industry operations investigators received in late summer to begin spending at least six hours a week on immigration-related work. It was difficult to understand what this meant: their job was to inspect firearms dealers. To comply, he began scouring dealership sales records for buyers with foreign-sounding names, which were then forwarded to the Department of Homeland Security. This struck him as a monumental misuse of resources.

This is what pushed him over the edge and made him decide, too, to take early retirement in September. “I didn’t register as an immigration agent,” he said. “I’m just not that.”

Asked about such orders, ATF’s Roman said, “In support of President Trump’s whole-of-government approach to combating illegal immigration, ATF is assisting the Department of Homeland Security and other federal law enforcement partners in their immigration enforcement efforts. To ensure the operational security and safety of our agents and partners, ATF does not disclose details or specific numbers of personnel deployments or law enforcement activities.”

Now that Robinson was gone, his old team had shrunk from 10 to six people, with a temporary supervisor. He worried about what the changes to the ATF meant for public safety. “I’m not saying I can see the future, but I don’t see things getting better,” he said. “I see things getting worse.”

“Everybody was a little bit shocked by what was happening,” Marianna Mitchem said last December, speaking at a conference on gun violence at the Center for American Progress, the center-left think tank in Washington. She outlined what the ATF had accomplished in recent years, then laid bare the extent of the rollback now underway.

Mitchem told advocates they should look to officials in their home states and towns to try to fill the void left by the Trump administration. “It’s up to the states to start tackling this trafficking problem, because unfortunately you’re not going to have the support of the ATF,” she said.

This has already started happening in a few places. In the suburbs of Philadelphia, a city that has suffered one of the worst increases in homicides of the pandemic era but since exp experienced a dramatic improvement, the county sheriffs started conduct more inspections at dealerships to compensate for the decline in ATF enforcement. A member of the conference audience asked Mitchem what else states could do to respond. Her response suggested she wasn’t sure.

“ATF hasn’t always been the most well-known agency. I think we kind of liked that. We did a really, really good job and kept our heads down,” she said. “And now you’re trying to let everyone know that, unfortunately, there are still good people there, but they’ve been redirected.”

In February, Trump’s nominee to head the agency, Robert Cekada, downplayed the shift during his speech. confirmation hearing. Cekada is a 20-year veteran of the ATF, a fact that gun safety advocates have tried to reassure. Cekada testified that the agency continued to “conduct dealership inspections without hindrance.”

But the ATF has made it much more difficult for researchers and the public to follow this work. It took the administration more than 15 months to publish a statement of the number of dealer licenses it has revoked: 56 in 2025, down 69% from the previous year. Cekada also challenged a report last fall that 80% of ATF agents had been reassigned to immigration enforcement. The reassignment never involved more than 100 officers at any given time, Cekada said. “In these operations, the ATF focused on offenders who were illegally armed with firearms,” he told senators.

But as the former federal prosecutors and ATF agents I spoke with pointed out, the key question when it comes to combating trafficking is whether prosecutors are pursuing cases. After all, the ATF investigates the cases, but U.S. attorneys prosecute them. And here the evidence suggests a retreat. A ProPublica analysis shows that in the first year of the Trump administration, the DOJ denied 30 percent more ATF referrals for major trafficking-related charges than the previous year.

Despite the high rate of denial of referrals to the ATF, the DOJ ended up prosecuting almost as many gun trafficking cases from all sources last year as it did in 2024. But a growing share of the cases, about 30 percent, fell under the new trafficking conspiracy charges included in the 2022 law, which since its inception has proven particularly helpful in gun trafficking cases across the Mexican border: about a fifth of all cases people charged under this law in the last year. 2024 and 2025 are in one district, West Texas. Asked about the increase in denials of ATF referrals and the shift toward border-related cases, DOJ spokeswoman Katie Kenlein said, “The department declines to comment on prosecution strategy. »

Webster, the Johns Hopkins researcher, said the numbers leave little doubt that blanket anti-trafficking enforcement is being abandoned. “Everything is hijacked,” he says. “It’s all about immigrants.”

On April 29, just after being confirmed director of the ATF, Cekada announced 34 proposed rule changes, including require dealers to hold records for only 20 or 30 years, not indefinitely, and limit ATF scrutiny of state-issued permits that can replace background checks on buyers. “We propose to remove unnecessary barriers that stood in the way of law-abiding citizens and businesses,” he said, joined by leaders of the NRA and the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

One crucial Biden-era reform has persisted: crackdowns on ghost guns. The 2022 ATF regulation survived a Supreme Court challenge last year, and lawsuits filed by several cities helped drive the main producer of ghost weapons into bankruptcy. Webster and other criminologists note that the reduced flow of ghost guns correlates with a significantly lower rate of shootings among teenagers, who had been heavy gun users during the 2020-2021 homicide surge.

Even this progress appeared to be under threat. In early April, a joint status report submitted to the federal court in Texas, where the case arose, stated that “ATF has indicated that it plans to take action to modify the challenged rule” (even though the rule was upheld by the Supreme Court). A day later, the White House’s 2027 budget called for reversing “the imposition of excessive restrictions on homemade firearms.” But five days later, the DOJ notified the court in the Texas case that “the government has decided to maintain the definition” that underlies the ghost gun rule. When asked for clarification, ATF’s Roman said last week: “ATF is still conducting legal reviews for other, more technically difficult rules. If changes are needed after the review, a proposal will be published.” For now, a key pipeline valve remains closed.