Trump prepares to wipe out years of progress on gun violence

By the time Joe Biden became president in January 2021, guns were the top killer of children and teens in America, overtaking car crashes and cancer as the leading cause of death. As that trend continued, the Biden White House responded with gun safety policies to enforce existing laws and bolster gun-violence prevention programs. In June 2022, following mass shootings at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY, and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Congress passed gun legislation for the first time in three decades. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act strengthened background checks for some gun buyers and prohibitions for domestic abusers, and it dedicated about $15 billion for states to build mental health and violence intervention programs. The Biden White House later established the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and an initiative to help states implement “red flag” laws that allow for removing guns from troubled people who pose a danger to themselves or others.

These policies at a broad level have coincided with a reduction in gun violence nationally: By 2024, shooting homicides overall were in steady decline throughout the country. Mass shootings also declined, both by conservative and broader measures of the problem.

Now, President Donald Trump has moved quickly to undo the progress made with gun safety policies. He shut down the Office of Gun Violence Prevention immediately after taking office. And on Feb. 7, he signed an executive order directing US Attorney General Pam Bondi to “examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies” from Biden’s term, to assess whether those “infringe on the Second Amendment rights” of Americans. Within 30 days, Bondi is to give Trump “a plan of action.”

Trump made clear during his 2024 campaign what that plan is likely to do. At the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Dallas last May, he vowed to “roll back every Biden attack on the Second Amendment.”

Areas at risk could include efforts to combat the emerging danger from untraceable firearms that are made from kits or using 3-D printers, known as “ghost guns.” Trump has a history from his first term in office of undermining regulation of these weapons. When Biden became president, crime involving ghost guns was skyrocketing. Biden moved to make such firearms subject to serial numbers and background checks, and later established an ATF task force to focus on the problem. (A gun industry-backed challenge to Biden’s ghost gun policy is currently at the Supreme Court.) By 2023, crimes using ghost guns began declining nationally.

The problem of ghost guns came back into stark view in December, when a disgruntled 26-year-old man allegedly used one to execute UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a street in New York City. That attack apparently was the first time a ghost gun was used for a high-profile assassination.

Red flag laws, which have strong bipartisan support among voters and spread to nearly half of all states in recent years, are also vulnerable under Trump. In early 2024, then-Vice President Kamala Harris announced a new center based at Johns Hopkins University to provide technical and training support to states implementing the laws, an initiative funded with a grant from the US Justice Department. Studies in California and elsewhere have shown that these laws— which allow a civil court judge to remove guns temporarily based on evidence that a person poses a threat—are effective for preventing suicide and mass shootings.

Trump in fact openly supported red flag laws following a spate of gun massacres in summer 2019. But in 2022, he blasted the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which provided states with funding for red flag laws, painting it as a nefarious gun grab by “Radical Left Democrats” and “RINO” senators including Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn.

Demagoguery from Trump and the firearms industry about government “gun grabs” is disconnected from the reality in the United States. There are more than 400 million guns in circulation today, far surpassing the total population. Americans buy more than a million guns every month, and in many states there are few restrictions on doing so. The number of civilian-owned AR-15s—a popular rifle that was designed for maximum killing in war and became a profit center for the industry—has ballooned to well over 20 million. In recent years those became the weapon of choice for mass shooters, too.

Trump’s supporters in the gun industry now anticipate a big political payoff.

“NRA members were instrumental, turning out in record numbers to secure his victory, and he is proving worthy of their votes, faith, and confidence in his first days in office,” NRA CEO Doug Hamlin said in a statement after Trump’s executive order.

“Gun owners fought hard to elect a president who would take a sledgehammer to Biden’s unconstitutional gun control policies, and today, President Trump proved he’s serious about that fight,” Aidan Johnston, a director for Gun Owners of America, said in a statement. “We hope that this executive order is just the first of many victories reestablishing our Second Amendment rights during the Trump administration.”

Gun safety advocates are sounding the alarm, including those galvanized by the devastating high school massacre that took place seven years ago Friday in Parkland, Florida.

“Trump’s priorities couldn’t be more clear. Spoiler: it’s not protecting kids. Gun deaths finally went down last year, and Trump just moved to undo the rules and laws that helped make that happen,” said Natalie Fall, Executive Director of March For Our Lives, in a statement. “He is going to get Americans killed in his thirst for vengeance and eagerness to please the gun lobby and rally armed extremists. Remember the next time that a mass shooting happens, Trump did everything in his power to enable it, not prevent it.”