As my colleague Tom Knighton noted on Monday morning, the 30-day deadline for Attorney General Pam Bondi to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order to “examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies” in regards to the Second Amendment passed over the weekend without any public release of her findings.
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While the Attorney General was also tasked with talking to Trump’s domestic policy advisor to come up with a plan to repeal or roll back any actions that violate our right to keep and bear arms, which will probably take some time, almost an entire week has gone by without any word from the DOJ about Bondi’s recommendations, and now even the mainstream media is picking up on the lack of communication from the AG’s office.
ABC News highlighted the silence of the AG in a news story on Wednesday afternoon, and spoke to Andrew Willinger, executive director of the Center for Firearms Law at Duke University School of Law, who believes the wording of the order itself is a sign that repealing the Biden-era gun restrictions isn’t a top priority for the Trump administration.
“Obviously, if there were things that were on the administration’s radar as possibly violating the Second Amendment or violating the rights of gun owners in some way, they could have started to roll those back right away and wouldn’t have needed to take this intermediate step of issuing a directive to the Attorney General to figure out what those were,” Willinger said. “That suggests that there’s nothing out there that the administration viewed as so pressing that they have to get rid of it right away.”
Despite Willinger’s claims, ABC News pointed out that Trump’s order did actually include some specifics.
In his executive order, Trump instructed Bondi that in addition to reviewing all presidential actions taken on gun control from January 2021 to January 2025, he wanted her to review rules about firearms and federal firearm licensing implemented by the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF).
Trump specifically asked Bondi to review the ATF’s “enhanced regulatory enforcement policy” — also called the “zero tolerance policy” — implemented in 2021 under Biden and former Attorney General Merrick Garland to identify federal firearms dealers who violate the 1968 Gun Control Act.
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We also know that the DOJ has set up a working group tasked with coming up with names of prohibited persons who should have their rights restored, and perhaps a system to streamline that process as well, so there’s clearly been some action taken in response to the president’s EO. Second Amendment groups have also been cheered by FBI Director Kash Patel being named interim director of the ATF, but we’re still still waiting to see any action to formally undo the ATF rules promulgated under Biden’s watch… and not just those specifically mentioned by Trump.
It is unclear whether or not Bondi met the deadline on delivering the report — nothing had been publicly released as of Wednesday. When ABC News asked this week about Bondi’s pending plan of action, Department of Justice officials said they would check but had no immediate information on the report’s status. The White House also did not respond to ABC News’ inquiry about Bondi’s pending report.
It’s not like the Trump administration has proven itself incapable of acting quickly to undo the damage done by the Biden regime. We’ve seen rollbacks of Biden’s policies and practices in agency after agency over the past few weeks, but the only real action we’ve seen regarding Biden’s gun policies are the multiple requests by DOJ to pause ongoing litigation against the ATF rules put in place over the past few years while Bondi conducts her investigation.
I’m not worried about Trump enacting new gun control laws, but we need more than a policy of benign neglect in the new administration. Bondi, Patel, and other officials should be aggressively rolling back the rules and regulations that are infringing on our Second Amendment rights, and if they’re not ready to publicly release or discuss Bondi’s findings they should at least inform gun owners that the review is complete and changes are on the way.
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