The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives announced April 7 that it is ending its zero tolerance policy for lawbreaking gun dealers, rolling back a Biden-era crackdown that triggered the steepest increase in gun store license revocations in the agency’s history.
The policy, instituted by President Joe Biden in 2021, instructed the ATF to revoke the license of any gun dealer found to have willfully committed any of five serious violations, including selling a gun without a background check or falsifying business records. The change led to an immediate spike in revocations, which climbed to record highs in fiscal years 2023 and 2024.
“This Department of Justice believes that the 2nd Amendment is not a second-class right,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement announcing the change. “The prior administration’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ policy unfairly targeted law-abiding gun owners and created an undue burden on Americans seeking to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms – it ends today.”
From its outset, the policy drew the ire of the gun industry and gun rights groups, who complained of overly strict enforcement. In October 2024, The Trace substantiated rumors that the ATF had revoked some licenses for relatively minor clerical violations to comply with the policy. But gun store inspection records published by the agency showed that the vast majority of revocations had come in response to clear violations of federal law, The Trace found.
The policy was quietly relaxed in 2024 as part of a court challenge.
Biden announced the policy after an investigation by The Trace and USA TODAY found that the ATF had routinely let lawbreaking gun dealers off the hook for serious violations that armed violent criminals and supplied gun trafficking networks. Investigators often recommended revoking licenses only to have their superiors downgrade the penalties to warnings, allowing repeat offenders to stay in business.
While the policy’s repeal does not alter the requirements gun stores must meet under federal law, gun violence prevention advocates fear it could lead the ATF to revert to a more conciliatory approach.
“This action is particularly devastating because we know the zero-tolerance policy worked,” Kris Brown, president of the gun reform group Brady, said in a statement. “The policy specifically targeted the small percentage of dealers with egregious violations, who were often responsible for flooding our streets with illegal firearms, and its removal undermines years of progress in combating illegal firearms trafficking.”
Gun industry and gun rights groups — including the Gun Owners of America, the National Rifle Association, and the National Shooting Sports Foundation — praised the reversal.
“Targeting lawful firearms dealers over minor clerical errors was a direct attack on the firearms industry and commerce protected by the Constitution,” John Commerford, executive director of the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action, said in a statement.
The change comes two months to the day after President Donald Trump, on February 7, ordered Bondi to review the Biden administration’s gun actions for “any ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.”
It’s unclear if Bondi has finished her review. The Trace filed a public records request for a copy of the review in March. The Justice Department has not fulfilled that request.
The ATF also announced that it’s reviewing two other Biden-era policies.
In 2024, the Biden administration issued a rule to narrow what is often called the “gun show loophole,” or private sales loophole. The loophole allows individuals selling firearms privately, sometimes at gun shows, to avoid federal licensing requirements and background checks.
If the DOJ reverses the rule, it could allow unlicensed sellers to repeatedly sell firearms without conducting background checks, but the legal implications are complex. The Biden administration’s actions were based on the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which clarified that anyone selling guns “predominantly for profit” must be licensed and conduct background checks. Legal challenges are likely, as the BSCA remains law.
The other review is of a Biden-era ATF regulation that cracked down on guns equipped with stabilizing braces, popular accessories that have been used in some mass shootings. These accessories increase the accuracy and stability of assault-style pistols – firearms that combine the maneuverability of a handgun with characteristics of a rifle while remaining relatively concealable.
A number of lawsuits have challenged the pistol-braces rule, and judges have largely blocked its enforcement. Reversing the rule could render those cases moot, effectively freeing pistol-braced weapons from tougher regulation.
