The Trump admin tried to merge DEA and ATF. After pressure, it quietly abandoned the plan

After pushback from both gun rights and gun control groups, the Trump administration has quietly abandoned its plan to merge the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives into the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to people briefed on the matter.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced plans last year to merge ATF into the DEA, a proposal that would require Congressional budgetary approval and is part of the early administration-wide effort to shrink the size of federal government agencies.

Officials involved in the proposal told CNN at the time of Blanche’s proposal that the two agencies had different missions — ATF is tasked with investigating violent crime, gun trafficking, arson and bombings, while DEA agents enforce the nation’s drug laws — but they naturally went hand-in-hand.

“Where there are drugs there are usually guns, and where there are guns there are usually drugs,” one of the officials previously told CNN.

The effort was re-affirmed in June, when Justice Department officials suggested eliminating the ATF “as a separate component, with its functions merged into the Drug Enforcement Administration,” leaving the DEA as “a single component that will address violent crime, drug enforcement, and crimes relating to firearms” in their budget proposal.

Administration officials’ expectations that pro-Trump gun-rights groups would welcome the plans were dashed almost immediately.

Some conservative and gun-rights groups have long called for the ATF’s abolishment but raised concerns that a merger with another agency would empower the agency’s gun-related efforts, not weaken them. The MAGA groups want ATF gone and the laws it enforces repealed. Giving its powers to another agency makes things worse, a gun rights source told CNN.

“Regulating guns is a hot potato. Everyone is for eradicating illegal drugs. Not everyone is for gun regulation,” one person involved in the Trump administration discussions that followed the Blanche memo told CNN.

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Florida House Wastes Little Time Repealing Parkland-Era Gun Control Law

It didn’t take long for the Florida House to approve a bill that would allow adults 18 and older to once again purchase long guns in the state, undoing a measure adopted after the Parkland shootings in 2018 that raised the age to purchase a firearm to 21. The 2026 session kicked off in Tallahassee on Tuesday, and by Thursday afternoon the repeal bill had already cleared the lower chamber in a 74-37 vote.

House Majority Leader Tyler Sirois, a Merritt Island Republican who is sponsoring this year’s bill, said the Parkland shooting was a “tragedy.” But he said lowering the minimum gun-buying age to 18 is about Second Amendment rights.

“The legislation seeks to restore the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens,” Sirois said.

But Rep. Christine Hunschofsky, a Parkland Democrat who was the city’s mayor at the time of the mass shooting, said the law that increased the minimum age to 21 has “stood the test of time” and that it has been found constitutional by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“This bill today is going to hurt families,” Hunschofsky said.

It’s true that the Eleventh Circuit upheld Florida’s law using the bizarre argument that “minors” couldn’t enter into legal contracts at the time of the Founding, which it considered analogous to depriving young adults of their ability to purchase a firearm today. But Hunschofsky failed to acknowledge that other appellate courts have concluded that adults under the age of 21 are fully vested with their Second Amendment rights, and the Supreme Court is currently hanging on to close to a half-dozen cases dealing with the conflict, including the NRA’s challenge to Florida’s law.

The law in question has been in place less than a decade, so it’s hardly stood the test of time. It has, however, remained in place despite the fact that the Florida House of Representatives has voted to repeal it for four years straight. Over the past three years the Florida Senate has failed to follow suit, and it sounds like gun owners once again have their work cut out for them in the upper chamber.

When asked Tuesday about the issue, Senate President Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula, noted that last year, senators “were not supportive of it. I have not heard anything different this year.”

“We are clearly a responsible gun-law state and we have a lot of freedoms here with the Second Amendment, which I’m proud of,” Albritton said. “But as it relates to that bill, it will be determined by the (committee) chairs in the Senate and the Senate appetite for such a bill as a whole.”

Albritton himself has been noncommittal about repeal, but former Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, who chairs the powerful Senate Rules Committee, has been vocally opposed to undoing the gun control law. Albritton could always use some parliamentary slight of hand and assign the House bill to another committee, but at this point he’s expressed no interest in doing so.

Florida gun owners should be contacting their state senators and demanding they restore the right to keep and bear arms to young adults in the Sunshine State. I think there’s a very good chance the Supreme Court will eventually say that it’s unconstitutional to block adults under the age of 21 from purchasing or possessing firearms, but we’re still probably a couple of years away from that decision. In the meantime, the rights of under-21s continue to be curtailed, and its up to the Florida legislature to correct its error. The House has done its part. Now it’s time for the Senate to do the same.

DeStefano flown to New York City, prepping for court hearings

by Lee Williams

Indie Guns owner Lawrence Michael DeStefano was picked up from Florida’s Orange County Jail by New York detectives this week after serving nearly 90 days in custody and flown to New York City aboard a private jet.

When they landed, the officers took a group photo and then rushed DeStefano to an NYPD precinct to be booked, and then to a quick court hearing in Queens. Afterward, he was taken to Rikers Island, a notorious 413-acre state prison located in the East River near the Bronx, where he remains incarcerated.

At the court hearing, a New York State prosecutor tried to portray him as an “evil gun runner,” DeStefano said, but the judge cut her off.

“The judge looked at her and said, ‘I have a 65-year-old man with no criminal record and you’re saying all these bad things about him.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘You’ve got some real serious charges against you. If you’ve got somewhere to stay, I will let you out on bail,’” DeStefano said over a jail phone Friday morning. “This is going to be a fight and the gloves are off. I am going balls-to-the-wall on this. It’s going to get ugly.”

DeStefano’s court-appointed defense attorney was of little help. She showed up just seconds before the hearing began.

“She had no idea what was going on,” he said.

He will appear in court for a bail hearing in two weeks, DeStefano said.

“I need to figure out how to get a message to the gun community,” he said. “If I am out on bail, I could win this. I know what I need to do to win this. I need to do research, but they’re seizing it for evidence. They already deleted my Telegram account after they got my password,” he said.

Throughout the trip, the detectives were talking furiously with the New York State Attorney General’s Office about whether to issue a press release, DeStefano said.

“It was chaos. Everyone was on their phones. They decided to issue a press release,” he said. “You guys really think you’re doing a press release? You’re helping me. The gun culture is a tight-knit family.”

New York State Attorney General Letitia James issued a massive press release late Wednesday, titled, “Attorney General James and NYPD Commissioner Tisch Announce Indictment of Florida Man for Illegally Shipping Firearms and Ghost Guns to New York.”

It contains a link to a 42-page indictment that charges DeStefano with 71 felonies, which could see him jailed for a total of 521 years.

“Lawrence Destefano and his company Indie Guns are accused of flooding New York with illegal firearms, and we are determined to bring him to justice,” James said in the press release. “I will not tolerate illegal and dangerous weapons in our communities, and I thank our partners in law enforcement for their work to shut down this ghost gun supplier.”

Despite the allegation and the centuries behind bars DeStefano faces, the press release indicates that only a dozen actual firearms were recovered, along with “two ghost gun kits, 28 high-capacity magazines, and over 1,400 rounds of ammunition, which were mailed to locations in Brooklyn, Queens, and Nassau County.”

The press release also mentions the default judgement James won in a civil suit against DeStefano, which he ignored.

“In March 2024, Attorney General James secured a $7.8 million judgment and court order against Indie Guns prohibiting it from selling firearms in New York,” the press release states.

The lengthy press release even includes quotes from NYPD Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch, HSI New York Special Agent in Charge Ricky J. Patel and USPIS Inspector in Charge Ketty Larco-Ward of the New York Division. All strongly supported James for “disrupting the dangerous illicit weapons pipeline,” and for “dismantling gun trafficking networks.”

DeStefano knows he will be severely outgunned in court.

“I am ready for the fight,” he said.

Man Successfully Registers Potato as Silencer

“TATE001”

That’s the official serial number of what appears to be the first legally registered 9mm potato silencer, according to a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) registration form obtained by The Reload. It’s registered to a man named Zach Clark, who said he pulled off the feat as an act of defiance against the National Firearms Act (NFA).

“It’s a good way to highlight to normal people that like, ‘Yeah, this is dumb,’” Clark told The Reload. “This whole law is kind of dumb.”

The spud suppressor may be the most remarkable result of the NFA tax cut enacted at the beginning of the year as part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which made the cost of registering suppressors $0 and opened up the floodgates. The ATF saw more NFA electronic registration requests on New Year’s Day than at any time in its history. The lower cost of compliance, combined with a recently-digitized process, has made new kinds of suppressors–including disposable or even meme designs–more viable than before.

“The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) informed NSSF that on Thursday, January 1, 2026, alone, an unprecedented surge in e-Forms submissions were being processed,” the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s trade group, said last week. “That total was approximately 150,000 e-Forms. For an eye-popping comparison, last year, ahead of the $200-to-$0 tax change, typical daily volume on e-Forms for suppressors, SBRs and SBSs would hover closer to around 2,500.”

While the NFA requires registration of all sound-suppressing devices that attach to a gun barrel to be registered with the ATF, it provides a process for people to register their own homemade designs. In the same way that somebody buying a suppressor from a store would have to fill out an NFA registration form and get the ATF to approve it before taking possession of the device, a home builder has to submit their intent to build one and get approval before actually constructing the device.

Clark went through that process with his potato suppressor design. He said he made sure to keep potatoes out of his house while he waited to hear back from the ATF.

“As of this moment, I have the serialized washer, and I have the potato, but I haven’t put it together,” he told The Reload. “There’s a manufacturing buffer on that from approval; you have to wait. Plus, that’s a whole thing of like, what is your manufacturing intent? Does it count when you’ll buy the potato? Is it having any potato in your house? Any potato products?”

Potato silencer registration submission form
Potato silencer registration submission form / Zachary Clark

While Clark’s registration effort is something of a troll, gun-rights lawyer Matt Larosiere noted it isn’t entirely a laughing matter.

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ATF Data Shows The Number of Guns in Americans’ Hands Now Tops Half a Billion.

NSSF, The Firearm Industry Trade Association, released the Firearm Production in the United States including the Firearm Import and Export Data 2025 Edition (reporting 2023 data) to its members. The report compiles the most up-to-date information based on data sourced from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF’s) Annual Firearms Manufacturing and Export Reports (AFMER).

The report is available free to members by logging into the NSSF Member Portal here.

Key findings for public release showed:

  • The estimated total number of firearms in civilian possession from 1990–2023 is 506.1 million, according to data in reports such as ATF Firearms Commerce in the United States, ATF AFMER and Congressional Research Service and including the collective ATF AFMER reports up to the 2023 edition.
  • Total domestic firearm production reported in the 2023 AFMER was 8,466,729 – a decrease of 15.4 percent from 2022 reported figures.
  • Data indicates that 32,091,000 Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs) are in circulation since 1990.
  • Modern Sporting Rifle (MSR) production decreased 46.2 percent from 2022 to 2023. This increased the estimated amount of MSRs produced (since 1990) by 4.5 percent from 30.7 million to 32 million.
  • In 2023, 13,574,653 total firearms were made available for the U.S. market, which includes firearms that were domestically produced plus those imported, minus exported firearms. Of those, 8,176,535 were handguns, 3,899,907 were rifles and 1,498,211 were shotguns.
  • From 1990 to 2023, 284.4 million firearms have been made available to the U.S. market.

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DOJ: Ban on mailing concealable firearms unconstitutional, can’t be enforced

A nearly 100-year-old federal ban on mailing handguns through the U.S. Postal Service is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced, according to an opinion released Thursday by the Department of Justice (DOJ).

The 15-page opinion concluded that a 1927 law, which made it illegal to use the Postal Service to mail concealable firearms, such as pistols and revolvers, infringes on the Second Amendment.

“Section 1715 makes it difficult to travel with arms for lawful purposes, including self-defense, target shooting, and hunting,” wrote T. Elliot Gaiser, the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.

“The statute also imposes significant barriers to shipping constitutionally protected firearms as articles of commerce, which interferes with citizens’ incidental rights to acquire and maintain arms,” the opinion continued.

Postal Service policy mandates that nonmailable firearms found in the mail stream “must be immediately reported to the United States Postal Inspection Service,” and investigations are then referred to the relevant U.S. attorney’s office for prosecution.

The agency categorizes “pistols, revolvers, and other firearms capable of being concealed on a person,” including short-barreled shotguns and rifles, as handguns. It also notes there are no restrictions on mailing rifles and shotguns between licensed dealers, manufacturers and importers.

Major private carriers, including UPS and FedEx, also restrict the shipping of firearms to only licensed dealers, which the opinion argued effectively creates a “complete ban” for unlicensed people.

The opinion acknowledged some limitations, finding the law was only unconstitutional related to handguns but still applied to undetectable firearms, such as pen guns.

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I can’t help but notice the Minneapolis riots against ICE only started kicking up once Nick Shirley exposed the Democrat daycare scams. It’s almost as if the Democrats were caught red handed and now they’re trying to distract everyone with violence and chaos.
The bureaucratic equivalent of resisting arrest.
– Rogan O’Handley

Kamala Harris Buys $8.2 Million Seaside Mansion After Warning ‘Sea Levels Are Rising’ Due to ‘Climate Crisis’
Harris’s new home features many of the same amenities—such as a gas stove and fireplace—that the Biden-Harris administration targeted with regulations

Former vice president Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff purchased an $8 million mansion in an exclusive oceanside Malibu neighborhood last month. The move came after Harris spent years warning that such communities could be threatened by the “climate crisis.”

A real estate listing for the mansion, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, says the luxury pad is “perched in a prime coastal location” with “breathtaking ocean views.” The property sits right near a coastline that—according to climate scenarios endorsed by Harris—is at risk of facing extreme flooding. A climate model issued by the Biden-Harris administration determined that Point Dume State Beach, the beach a short walk from Harris’s new property, would be severely damaged by sea level rise even under the model’s most modest projections. The Trump administration discontinued that model in June 2025.

The purchase, which was first reported by the New York Post, calls into question Harris’s earnestness when discussing the threats posed by what she calls the “climate crisis.”

“Our oceans are warming. Sea levels are rising,” Harris wrote during her short-lived presidential campaign in 2019. “Extreme weather is destroying our communities. We are poisoning the planet.”

As a senator, Harris cosponsored the Living Shorelines Act, which called for earmarking $50 million in federal funding a year for combating sea level rise, which threatens “thousands of coastal communities and economies.”

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