In the fall of 2024, a Colorado gun shop lost its federal license after investigators found that its owner had provided firearms for a convicted felon’s illegal online raffles. Now, under the Trump administration, it’s selling guns again. According to a new CNN investigation, The Outdoorsman’s Attic in Sheridan not only supplied the firearms for the Facebook raffles for years, but also falsified records to hide that they were transferred to a prohibited purchaser.
Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) uncovered the scheme along with 15 other violations and ultimately revoked the store’s license in November 2024. But less than a year later, the Trump administration reversed course and gave the shop its license back. CNN’s investigation found that The Outdoorsman’s Attic wasn’t alone: Nearly a dozen stores that had their licenses revoked in recent years for serious violations have been allowed to start selling firearms again under Trump’s ATF.
The Revocation Process
In 2024, the ATF revoked 195 gun dealer licenses, the largest number in more than two decades. But according to CNN, that still amounted to less than a quarter of one percent of all federally licensed dealers nationwide. Losing a license was, even at the height of ATF enforcement, a rare outcome reserved for the most egregious and repeat violators of federal law.
That rarity reflects how the enforcement process is structured. Revocation sits at the end of a multi-step process, frequently offering several opportunities for a dealer to correct its conduct long before they lose their license. Even before a dealer is issued a license, the ATF meets with the applicant to explain and discuss the federal requirements. From there, dealers are subject to periodic compliance inspections, and when violations turn up, the process typically escalates in stages: a written report, then a warning letter, and, for repeat offenders, an in-person “warning conference” before ATF ever issues a formal notice of revocation.
Much of what inspectors examine involves the dealer’s recordkeeping — paperwork that is of crucial importance to criminal investigations. Dealers are required to log every firearm that moves through their inventory, complete background checks on customers and a transaction record for each sale, and separately report when a customer buys multiple handguns within a short time frame. Those records are often the only lead investigators have once a firearm turns up at a crime scene, which is why falsified or missing paperwork can make it impossible to trace a gun back to the trafficker who put it on the street.
Relicensing Dangerous Gun Shops
In 2021, the ATF introduced the “zero tolerance” policy directing inspectors to revoke the licenses of dealers found to have willfully committed serious violations, including selling a gun without running a background check, falsifying sales records, transferring a firearm to a prohibited person, refusing to let the ATF inspect the store, or failing to respond to a police trace request. In April 2025, the Trump administration announced that it was ending this policy. Then, a month later, the ATF issued a notice inviting dealers who had lost their licenses to reapply for them.
The ATF confirmed to CNN that it has granted new licenses to at least 23 shops that were previously revoked but refused to name them. CNN was able to identify nearly a dozen of them, several of which had been revoked for serious violations. According to ATF records reviewed by CNN, two of the shops granted new licenses under Trump — Wessel Gun Shop in Warren, Michigan, and Tampa Tactical Supply in Riverview, Florida — had also been included in the Demand Letter 2 program over multiple years. As discussed here, dealers were subject to that monitoring program after having 25 or more crime guns with a “time to crime” of three years or less traced back to them within a single calendar year. The Trump administration also ended the decades-long Demand Letter 2 program in June 2025.
In addition to The Outdoorsman’s Attic, CNN’s investigation found The Tactical Edge, a gun store in Clarksville, Tennessee, has also resumed selling firearms. The ATF revoked the store’s license in March 2023 after compliance inspections in 2018, 2020, and 2022 uncovered the same types of violations again and again. The store repeatedly failed to run background checks on customers and complete federal transaction records, and even transferred firearms to underage buyers. After the 2018 and 2020 inspections, the ATF had warned the store that further violations “could be viewed as willful and may result in revocation.” The Tactical Edge sued to overturn its revocation, but a federal court dismissed the case in December 2023. Yet in October 2025, the Trump administration gave The Tactical Edge a new license to sell firearms.
The Tactical Edge’s owners did not dispute that the violations occurred. Instead, during the revocation process, they described them as a “mistake” and “human error.” This echoes an Ohio gun store owner who asked not to be named but told CNN that they had “made some mistakes” characterized as “clerical errors” — echoing language used by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s trade association.
Not everyone sees it that way. JaShawn Hill, who runs Chicago Survivors, a group that supports families affected by gun violence, disagrees with that framing. She told CNN, “Let’s say we forgot something in our taxes, right? We don’t get to say we were overwhelmed by paperwork or due dates or deadlines.” Hill added that if you’re a gun shop owner, “you know what you’re responsible for, and I think there’s even a higher level of responsibility because of the lives that can be impacted due to your malpractice.”