A Trump-emblazoned gun on display at SHOT Show 2024
A Trump-emblazoned gun on display at SHOT Show 2024 / Stephen Gutowski

Analysis: What Trump Could Do on Gun Policy [Member Exclusive]

Donald Trump cruised to victory on Tuesday, with the rest of his party trailing behind his pace but likely gaining complete control of Congress anyway. What will the new Republican trifecta be able to pull off on gun policy?

The results of the election are still coming in. We don’t know what the Republican majorities in the Senate of House will look like for sure yet. Technically, we don’t know if Republicans will hold the House–scrap any pro-gun legislative hopes if they don’t–though it seems very likely they will since Republicans are leading in more than enough uncalled races to get at least a slim majority.

The size of those majorities may matter a lot. First off, moving anything gun-related out of the House is going to be difficult with a slim majority that currently includes a few Republicans who have backed gun-control measures in the past. Second, the Senate is unlikely to get 60 votes on any significant pro-gun legislation.

The larger the Republican majority, the greater the odds it will bypass its most moderate members and nuke the 60-vote limit set by the filibuster. Trump has supported nuking it in the past, and Republicans may be more likely to do as he wants this time around–although Mitch McConnel has already said the filibuster is still secure. If the filibuster goes away, gun-rights activists’ top priorities, like silencer deregulation and national concealed-carry reciprocity, could become law.

Even if the filibuster remains, a larger Senate majority will make it easier for Trump to quickly appoint judges. That’s the strongest part of Trump’s pro-gun record and likely to be the most consequential in his second term. He may be able to appoint several more Supreme Court justices and, even if they don’t shift the ideological balance of the Court since the oldest members are already Republican appointees, that will further cement the pro-gun majority for years to come.

The possibility of affecting some gun policy changes through legislation would also remain under the filibuster. That would come through budget bills Congress passes through the reconciliation process. The GOP could steer the direction of federal agencies that enforce gun laws, like the ATF, by pulling on their purse strings.

Of course, Trump will also have the opportunity to directly impact federal agencies that regulate guns. He may not have focused on gun policy during his campaign, but he did promise to undo everything President Joe Biden did on guns with his executive authority.

“Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated my very first week back in office,” Trump told NRA members back in February.

That includes firing the current ATF Director, getting rid of that agency’s “zero tolerance” oversight of the gun industry, reorganizing or eliminating the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, and scrapping the federal rules Biden put in place. Or, at least, scrapping the ones he can since the Supreme Court appears poised to find the ATF’s “ghost gun” rule correctly interprets federal law.

Still, Trump will likely be able to unwind the pistol-brace ban, expanded regulation of used gun sales by regular people, and the latest gun export bans.

All of that would probably take time since Trump may have to go through the same lengthy federal rulemaking process that Biden used to implement those rules in order to undo them. Then there’s the possibility of using that rulemaking process to enact pro-gun rules. He hasn’t made any proposals on that front, and there are likely a lot of areas where Trump could put rulemaking to use to loosen rather than tighten gun regulations if he wants to go down that path.

Of course, last time around, his administration did the opposite with the bump stock ban (which the Supreme Court eventually struck down). The same is true of the ATF writ large. While Biden took the opportunity to appoint an ideologically aligned permanent director, even after failing the first time around, Trump stuck with career acting directors after his own party shot down his permanent nominee for a history of being too hostile to the industry.

Trump is a wild card in all of this. A lot of what happens on guns will depend on his priorities or even whims. While he made some promises early in the campaign, they mostly centered on undoing what Biden has done. Much of his campaign rhetoric on guns has focused on the threat Kamala Harris represented and how he prevented new gun control rather than promising to expand gun-rights protections, which, frankly, seems to be enough for most gun voters.

Then, there’s Trump’s tendency to consider new gun restrictions in the aftermath of major mass shootings. During his first term, he reportedly thought about supporting a ban on AR-15s and other so-called assault weapons in the wake of the El Paso shooting before being talked out of it. He publicly backed a “red flag” proposal in a meeting with lawmakers after the Parkland shooting, saying he wanted to “take the guns first” and have “due process second.”

So, while the likelihood of new pro-gun laws has certainly increased in the wake of the 2024 election, the possibility of new gun-control laws may have as well. After all, Trump would probably only need to move a small percentage of Republicans to pass any sort of gun restriction. He’s much more likely to be able to do that, if he ever wants to, than Harris would have been.

Then again, the “red flag” proposal never came to fruition because Trump’s first impeachment began before it got a chance to become a fully-fledged bill. A million things have changed since then, and it’s not clear if Trump will have any interest in working with Democrats on anything this time around.

Ultimately, it’s impossible to know exactly what the next four years will look like. But the possibilities are becoming clearer, at least.

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Created by potrace 1.16, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2019

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Created by potrace 1.16, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2019

Comments From Reload Members

2 Responses

  1. My read on Donald J. is that he has no firm ideology, and may do what the spirit tells him to do at any given time. We shall see, but I don’t bank on a President Trump being a savior to gun rights. Hope I am wrong.

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