DOJ and ATF Announce Regulatory Reforms to Reduce Burdens on Law-Abiding Gun Owners and Businesses

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) is releasing this week 34 notices of final and proposed rulemaking following a comprehensive review of existing regulations conducted in compliance with Executive Order 14206, Protecting Second Amendment Rights. Consistent with ATF’s commitment in 2025 to rebuild trust with Federal Firearms and Explosives Licensees (FFLs/FELs) and industry stakeholders, this review included a consideration of industry and expert feedback and concerns. This landmark release is the first in a series of regulatory updates ATF plans to issue.

The resulting rules are an effort to reduce unnecessary burdens on law-abiding citizens and businesses while modernizing regulatory frameworks that no longer reflect current law, agency practice, or court precedent. The aim is simpler, clearer regulations that do not compromise ATF’s ability to perform its critical missions to protect American communities from violent crime.

“The Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” said U.S. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “This Department of Justice is ending the weaponization of federal authority against law-abiding gun owners. We will continue to vigorously defend their rights as the Constitution demands.”

Robert Cekada, who was recently confirmed by the U.S. Senate as ATF Director, said “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.” He added, “Our enforcement focus from here on out is on willful violators and criminal actors, not inadvertent compliance issues by responsible owners and licensees.”

Summaries of the rules are available on atf.gov. ATF encourages broad public participation in its regulatory process and invites input on the proposed changes. The agency is committed to reviewing input in a timely manner and ensuring consideration of significant feedback into the final rules.

Clear instructions for submitting comments may be found via the Federal eRulemaking Portal at Regulations.gov and in each NPRM. The comment periods will generally be open for 90 days from the date of publication, but may vary. Please pay attention to the “DATES” section in each proposal for details.

The neighbors not hearing gunfire from inside a home isn’t unusual.

Man shoots intruder during attempted home invasion robbery in Kent

KENT, Wash. — Police say an attempted home invasion robbery in Kent ended in a shooting Monday morning.

One suspect is now in the hospital and police say at least one other suspect is still on the run.

It all unfolded at a home on the corner of Cambridge and Hampton.

Police say five family members were inside – the two homeowners, their daughter and her husband, along with a young child.

The daughter woke up to a noise and called 911, according to Kent Police.

“Woke up her husband – he’s the one that went down after retrieving his firearm from the safe next to his bed… he went downstairs and that’s when she heard the shots and the suspect was shot and we responded,” said Kent Police Assistant Chief Jarod Kasner.

Officers found a man on the floor, shot multiple times, with a gun nearby.

No family members were hurt.

Police say the intruder was armed and was likely with at least one other person.

“We believe the suspect wasn’t alone. The caller believes that there were other people in the house,” said Kasner.

Efforts to track down another suspect came up empty. Investigators spent around 11 hours gathering evidence.

Neighbors told KIRO 7 they didn’t hear any gunfire.

“It’s kind of scary – all morning I was trying to figure out what was going on because it’s too close to home,” said Bobbi Wheeler, who lives across the street.

Investigators are now hoping the suspect recovers so he can answer some questions.

“Now we have to figure out what sequence of events got him to that point. We don’t know why they picked that home,” said Kasner.

New Pew Research Confirms ‘Assault Weapons’ Rarely Used in Crimes

Pew Research has released some interesting and new collated data on gun-involved crimes in the United States in 2024, and their stats confirm what Second Amendment advocates and those opposed to bans on so-called assault weapons have been saying for decades: they are rarely used in crimes of any kind in the United States.

According to Pew, rifles of all kinds (including so-called assault weapons) were involved in just 3% of gun-related homicides in 2024. Handguns were involved in 53%, with “undetermined” firearms involved in 42% of homicides.

The Supreme Court rejected the idea that handguns could be banned just because they were the most popular choice of weapon for criminals, but gun control advocates are arguing that a category of commonly-owned firearms that is much less popular among violent criminals can be outlawed.

Of course, it’s not garden variety criminals who the gun control lobby invoke in their arguments about banning “assault weapons.” They regularly proclaim that AR-15s and other semi-automatic rifles are the weapon of choice for mass shooters. A 2023 report by the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, however, found that 74% of active shooters between 2016 and 2020 used handguns, while 32% used long guns (some used both, which is why the numbers don’t add up to 100%). Even among the most depraved criminals, handguns are far more common than “assault weapons.”

Pew also found far fewer active shootings overall in 2024; 24 separate events, which is a decline of almost 66% compared to the 61 recorded in 2021. Incidentally, Pew uses the FBI’s definition of an active shooting:  one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.

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We should never forget.

Dachau; I’ve been there. At the end of the 1st Gulf War, the troops whose home station was somewhere in Europe got a week long free leave with a planned – and mandatory – itinerary. On the way to a day in Munich, enroute to Berchtesgaden, a morning was spent touring Dachau.

Everyone walked around in silence, and when people did speak, it was always in near whispers.

I don’t know about today, but 35 years ago, you could walk right into the building where the gas chambers and crematory ovens are, and feel the hair rise up on the back of your neck as you looked into the black insides of those ovens that burned uncounted dead.

Murder. Mass murder. Concentrated, premeditated murder on a scale that makes the ‘mass shootings’ the mewling liberal proggies wail about in their rants for gun control, pale in comparison.

And although you could walk right up to multiple little mass grave plots the size of a postage stamp front yard, marked Grave of Thousands Unknown this was ‘merely’ a concentration camp. Not one of the camps in Poland designed for industrial level mass slaughter.

On April 29, 1945 the U.S. Army’s 42nd Infantry Division (Rainbow), now a part of the New York Army National Guard, uncovered the concentration camp in the town of Dachau, near Munich Germany. According to a press release by the New York National Guard, the frontline soldiers in the Army unit knew there was a prison camp in the area, but knew few details about the camp’s true nature.

“What the Soldiers discovered next at Dachau left an impression of a lifetime,” the division assistant chaplain (Maj.) Eli Bohnen wrote at the time, according to the release. “Nothing you can put in words would adequately describe what I saw there. The human mind refuses to believe what the eyes see. All the stories of Nazi horrors are underestimated rather than exaggerated.”

The U.S. Army unit uncovered thousands of bodies of men, women and children held in the concentration camp.

“There were over 4,000 bodies, men, women and children in a warehouse in the crematorium,” Lt. Col. Walter Fellenz, commander of the 1st Battalion, 222nd Infantry, said in his report. “There were over 1,000 dead bodies in the barracks within the enclosure.”

“Riflemen, accustomed to witnessing death, had no stomach for rooms stacked almost ceiling high with tangled human bodies adjoining the cremation furnaces, looking like some maniac’s woodpile,” wrote Tech. Sgt. James Creasman, a division public affairs NCO in the 42nd Division World News, May 1, 1945.

“Dachau is no longer a name of terror for hunted men. 32,000 of them have been freed by the 42nd Rainbow Division,” Creasman wrote of the liberation.

The U.S. Holocaust Museum places the estimated number of those freed from the camp at more than 60,000.

If you believe in so-called “Gun Control”, then you believe that the Second Amendment, ratified in 1787, specifically and exclusively refers to the National Guard, which was created 130 years later, in 1917.

If you believe in so-called “Gun Control”, then you believe that the National Guard, federally funded, with bases on federal land, using federally-owned weapons, vehicles, buildings, and uniforms, punishing trespassers under federal law, is a “State” militia.

If you believe in so-called “Gun Control”, then you believe that private citizens shouldn’t have handguns because they are not “military weapons,” but private citizens shouldn’t have assault rifles because they are military weapons.

If you believe in so-called “Gun Control”, then you believe that “Assault Weapons” have no purpose other than to kill large numbers of people. The police need assault weapons. You do not.

BLUF
“Social-justice education is harming the very students it was meant to help,” Wilson concludes. “America’s most marginalized children are being left less educated, more excluded, and more vulnerable.” That’s not justice.

Focus on teaching kids to read — not fixing ‘root causes.’

Democrats “lost the plot on schools,” writes Charles Barone in Education Next. He suggests a “credible, student-centered education agenda” to regain leadership.

Democrats can “rejuvenate public education,” and “strengthen ties with Black, Latino, and suburban women — voting blocs that care deeply about school quality,” writes Thomas Toch in the Washington Monthly. But progressives and centrists have start talking to each other — and not just in insults.

Fordham’s Mike Petrilli spotlights the discussion on Schooled. In a follow-up, Vlad Kogan challenges Barone’s statement that, “public education desperately needs strengthening, but policymakers must address root causes by addressing the many hurdles in students’ lives that compound their challenges in classrooms.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong, writes Kogan. As he writes in his book, No Adult Left Behind, “people have been saying the way to fix urban education is to fix “root causes” since at least the 1960s.”

“It’s much easier to teach an elementary school child how to read than to fix poverty, racism, and other root causes,” Kogan writes. “If we don’t know how to use public policy to ensure that all kids how to read by the end of third grade, the idea that we’ll figure out how to use policy to fix much more difficult issues underlying ‘root causes’ is just implausible.”

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This Democrat Defending Hasan Piker Says His Extremist Rhetoric Reflects Rising American Frustration

Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) was asked in a recent interview why he continues to defend left-wing political pundits like Hasan Piker, who is widely known for inflammatory rhetoric, in the aftermath of an attempted assassination targeting top Trump administration officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday.

Despite acknowledging some of the controversial remarks attributed to Piker, including comments defending the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and praise for Hamas, Rep. Khanna argued that Piker is expressing a broader sense of frustration among Americans, one that he described as important to acknowledge.

“I have said that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. I was one of the first people who condemned the shooting of the United Healthcare executive. But millions of people follow Hasan Piker. Why? Because he’s speaking about some of the frustrations,” Rep. Khanna said. “He’s speaking about the fact that people don’t have health care in America.”

“There are a lot of people on the podcast world, etc., who say things that are outrageous or sensationalist,” he continued. “And I push back when you do that. But we have to understand the anger in this country of people who feel they can’t buy a house, they can’t afford gas, they can’t have health care.”

“They’re upset at the system. It’s one of the reasons Trump won twice. And we have to engage while condemning the violence,” he said. “I never engage in approving of violence, approving of the incitement of violence, and I’ll condemn it when I hear it.”

Unfortunately for both Khanna and Piker, murder, theft, and other illegal acts are not the ways in which real Americans choose to effect change in their country.

We effect change the way we learned after the American Revolution, through voting, and through persuading and changing the minds of our fellow Americans, not through violence. The moment that approach begins to falter, we risk watching our system of law and order fade, becoming a mere suggestion rather than a requirement.

Mainstreaming individuals who support or excuse violence, on either side, is reprehensible, and often indicative of an attempt to sow chaos and exploit it.

Now is the time to double down on the American system of governance, not to abandon it in pursuit of revolutionary change, which would not lead to positive reform but rather to an erosion of the American way of life.

Virginia Governor Gets Bad News on Background Check Bill

Since the Virginia General Assembly approved a revised version of the bill last week, there’s been a whole lot of confusion about Virginia’s HB 1525, which raises the age to purchase handguns from 18 to 21 and requires the Virginia State Police to resume conducting background checks on private sales. Governor Abigail Spanberger’s amended version contained language that declared the act an emergency, which would allow it to take effect immediately, but the legislature did not approve the changes with a 4/5ths vote, which is supposedly what’s required in order for that “emergency” provision to be adopted.

The Virginia legislative website lists the effective date for HB 1525 as July 1, but the Virginia State Police put out a notice on Tuesday that declared the law is already in effect. That was the good news for Spanberger.

The bad news? The VSP won’t be resuming background checks on private sales of firearms anytime soon… at least not without a court order.

Gun Owners of America and VCDL had threatened to seek contempt charges against the head of the VSP if they abided by Spanberger’s edict, and it looks like the VSP didn’t see that as an idle threat.

Keep in mind that there are three parts to HB 1525; a ban on those under 18 from possessing handguns and “assault firearms” except under limited circumstances, the ban on handgun and “assault firearm” sales to adults under the age of 21, and the edict to the VSP to start enforcing the enjoined universal background check law. The only portion of the law that the state police say will not be enforced is the section of law regarding background checks on private sales of firearms, and as far as the agency is concerned it’s now against the law for a 20-year-old to purchase an AR-15 in Virginia, even through a private sale.

Of course, as of July 1 it will be illegal for any adult over the age of 21 to purchase an AR-15 too. The sale ban wasn’t the primary motivation for HB 1525. It was the restoration of the state’s universal background check law, and the VSP just said that isn’t happening until a judge tells the agency it can resume enforcement.

So what will that take? The case cited by VSP has concluded, with then-Attorney General Jason Miyares declining to appeal the decision. Current AG Jay Jones attempted to intervene before he took office, but the Virginia Court of Appeals shut down that effort fairly quickly.

According to Virginia law:

Any court wherein an injunction has been awarded may at any time when such injunction is in force dissolve the same after reasonable notice to the adverse party, or to his attorney of record, in which notice shall be set forth the grounds upon which such dissolution will be asked, unless such grounds be set forth in an answer previously filed in the case by the party giving such notice.

Note the word “may” there. It sounds to me like Jones can ask the Lynchburg circuit judge to lift the injunction, but Judge F. Patrick Yeatts is under no obligation to abide by that request. It’s unclear whether the plaintiffs would be allowed to reply to that request or whether Yeatts could ask for additional briefings or even hold another round of oral arguments, but in any case the decision is left to the court that granted (or upheld) an injunction. This particular statute doesn’t even say that Yeatts’ decision could be appealed, though that might be covered in another part of Virginia’s statutes.

As I predicted last week, the issue of Virginia’s universal background check law is almost certainly headed back to the courts. I have no idea what the ultimate outcome will be, but at least in the short term Spanberger’s attempt to get around this court order has officially failed.

MOTION FILED IN THIRD SAF-SUPPORTED NATIONAL FIREARMS ACT LAWSUIT

BELLEVUE, Wash. — April 27, 2026 — Plaintiffs have filed a motion for summary judgment in Roberts v. ATF, one of the Second Amendment Foundation’s (SAF) three supported lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the National Firearms Act’s (NFA) registration requirements for short-barreled firearms and silencers.

Until President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the NFA established a $200 tax and registration regime on certain classes of firearms including silencers and short-barreled rifles, purportedly drawing from Congressional authority to levy taxes. After the One Big Beautiful Bill eliminated the $200 tax on those arms, SAF and its partners filed three lawsuits challenging the remaining registration requirements, because without the tax, Congress’ reliance on their taxing power is no longer justifiable.

“As we’ve stated in each of our three National Firearms Act challenges, Congress lacks the authority to continue requiring the registration of protected arms under the NFA,” said SAF Senior Director of Legal Operations Bill Sack. “The Court has everything they need to put this case to bed and end this infringement on the rights of Americans nationwide.”

SAF itself is a named plaintiff in the NFA lawsuit Brown v. ATF and is now backing two additional challenges – Jensen v. ATF and this case, Roberts v. ATF. Filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, the named plaintiffs in Roberts are Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, Center for Human Liberty, American Suppressor Association Foundation, Buckeye Firearms Association, Meridian Ordnance and two private citizens.

“We have the best opportunity in almost a century to end the registration scheme for silencers and short-barreled rifles under the NFA,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “SAF is seizing this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by supporting three separate cases challenging the unconstitutional law, and we’re optimistic this Second Amendment infringement will finally be lifted.”

No free government was ever founded, or ever preserved in its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for the defence of the state. . . . Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen.
– “M.T. Cicero” 1788