On April 29, 2026, newly confirmed Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) Director Robert Cekada and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche surrounded themselves with representatives from the gun industry and announced more than 30 new regulatory actions to water down gun laws on the books. As discussed here, the proposals will make it harder for law enforcement to solve violent gun crimes and identify gun traffickers, make it easier for prohibited persons to acquire guns, and represent a significant pullback from federal oversight and regulatory compliance efforts related to the gun industry.
Many of these proposals also suffer from procedural deficiencies that suggest the ATF did not thoroughly research and evaluate each of these proposals before issuing them. For example, multiple proposals do not include sufficient information to justify the change being made and either minimize the potential risks to public safety or ignore them entirely. Not only do these failures and omissions indicate a less-than-rigorous process at the ATF for developing these proposals, but they may make them vulnerable to future legal challenges if the agency finalizes these rules without correcting them.
Lacking Critical Information
Some of the ATF’s proposals would impose sweeping changes that would upend decades of practice and increase risks to public safety. Yet the ATF consistently fails to provide sufficient evidence or information to justify these changes. In the notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) revising the regulations used to determine whether a person is prohibited from buying or possessing guns under federal law due to a mental-health-related adjudication, the ATF proposes to completely change the definitions of key terms in a way that will allow some people who are currently prohibited to purchase guns going forward. The ATF acknowledges that this may include some people who have been determined by a court to pose a danger to themselves or others but admits that it does not have data on how many such people there may be. The ATF also states in this proposal that it assumes state laws will fill some of the gaps created by its new definitions but has failed to conduct an analysis of state laws to determine with certainty that this is the case — or account for the costs states will have to absorb to fill those gaps. Regarding both issues, rather than conducting adequate research before drafting the proposal, the ATF instead asks for comments from the public providing this information.
Other proposals suffer similar flaws. In the NPRM expanding the availability of non-over-the-counter gun sales, the ATF estimates without any supporting data, evidence, or documentation that 50 percent of gun buyers would choose to purchase guns using the new remote process in which the buyer and seller never interact face-to-face, and then uses that estimate as the basis for a cost-benefit analysis. In the NPRM that would allow gun dealers to destroy their gun sales and inventory records after either 20 or 30 years, the ATF asserts that the primary justification for the change is cost savings for the dealers and the ATF itself. Yet the ATF fails to include any specific information on the current costs of storing these records — which allow law enforcement to trace crime guns — to demonstrate that such costs are overly burdensome.
In the NPRM eliminating the requirement that individuals notify the chief law enforcement officer in their area of their intent to obtain an NFA weapon (such as a machine gun, silencer, or short-barreled rifle or shotgun), the ATF says that it “has no information” that this requirement “meaningfully aids criminal investigations or serves a significant purpose for law enforcement.” But the agency also concedes that it has not yet actually sought this information and “encourages public comments from [chief law enforcement officers] on whether these notices provide a benefit to them.”
While an agency can certainly use the rulemaking process to ask for additional data or relevant information in comments from stakeholders and the public to supplement its own research or provide additional context, for many of these proposals the ATF appears to have failed to obtain even the most basic data or information necessary for crafting the proposals in the first place to meet the intended goals or to accurately identify their full potential impacts.
Ignoring Risks to Public Safety
In the formal announcement of these rules, Director Cekada stated that the “ATF’s mission is to protect public safety and enforce the law — and these reforms reflect our commitment to doing that through regulations that are clear, legally sound, and narrowly tailored to that purpose.” Despite this and other repeated assurances that the proposals will not negatively impact public safety, many of the proposals reveal a failure by the ATF to even ask the question.
In the NPRM expanding the availability of non-over-the-counter gun sales, ATF estimates that these changes will result in 3.28 million more fully-remote purchases per year. While focusing on the estimated cost savings for gun buyers that this change will generate, the ATF fails to consider the potential costs or risks to public safety in allowing so many more gun sales to take place without an in-person interaction at a gun store. As the ATF and National Shooting Sports Foundation have emphasized for years, gun dealers play a key role in helping identify and prevent straw purchases, which are a primary way that prohibited purchasers and gun traffickers obtain firearms. By eliminating the opportunity for gun store employees to observe suspicious behavior that often signals an illegal straw purchase — like when a buyer seems hesitant to undergo a background check, is unfamiliar with the firearm being purchased, or is communicating with someone else who seems to be directing the purchase — this proposal obviously creates the risk of an increase in successful straw purchases. The same is true for recognizing warning signs that a prospective purchaser is under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or is in crisis. But the NPRM fails to even acknowledge these risks, much less attempt to quantify them or explain how the rule was drafted to minimize such risks.
Similarly, the NPRM entitled “Firearms Transactions and Straw Purchases” increases the risk of straw purchases without acknowledging or addressing that risk. This NPRM creates a new exception to the definition of “straw purchasing” for couples who purport to be spouses who live together. While claiming benefits for lawful gun owners seeking to buy guns as marital property, in this proposal the ATF fails to acknowledge that this new exception has the potential to be exploited by bad actors who are, in fact, engaging in a straw purchase for criminal purposes.
In another proposal, the ATF again ignores the obvious risk that prohibited persons may be able to buy firearms as a result of the change. In the NPRM entitled “Clarifying Exceptions to the Brady Act Background Check Requirement,” the ATF significantly weakens its oversight of state firearm permits that may be used as an alternative to a point-of-sale background check by providing that the ATF will only look at the literal text of a state statute governing permits and will not consider any evidence of deficiencies in the actual implementation of that statute. In the past, the ATF has used precisely this type of evidence to revoke this privilege from state permits where the permitting authority failed to conduct background checks prior to issuing permits or issued permits to federally prohibited people. The ATF does not address the risk that prohibited people will be able to buy guns based on shoddy state permitting processes as a result of this proposal — a risk that is a near certainty considering recent history.
To its credit, the ATF does admit that some of its proposals carry potential risks to public safety. Unfortunately, these potential risks are often immediately minimized or disregarded without serious discussion. In the NPRM related to the federal mental health prohibitor, the ATF acknowledges that the proposed rule’s costs “may be considerably greater” than minimal and may rise to a level “up to and including potential mass casualty events.” But the ATF does not appear to take those risks seriously and fails to make any meaningful effort to specifically quantify those costs and risks.
The ATF makes a similar admission in the proposal to make significant changes to the Form 4473, including to double the time frame for which a background check is valid. In that NPRM, the ATF admits that the change creates the possibility that a prohibited person may be able to purchase a firearm “and, hypothetically, use[] that firearm to inflict mass casualties.” Again, the ATF minimizes this risk by saying it “believes the number of such persons is negligible,” but admits that it “does not have any data on persons who might fall into this situation.”
The rulemaking process is designed to elicit substantive feedback and additional information from key stakeholders and the public. But the failures and omissions here suggest a flawed process designed to rush through changes to benefit the gun industry rather than to bolster the ATF’s stated mission of “protecting American communities from violent crime driven by the illegal use of firearms.”