A handgun made to honor President Donald Trump by Just Right Carbines is on display at the NRA Annual Meetings & Exhibits on April 25, 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The Trump administration has spent much of this year rewriting the federal government’s approach to guns. Just last month, the Justice Department concluded that the ban on selling handguns to 18-20-year-olds is unconstitutional and would no longer be criminally enforced.
But amid dozens of changes to federal firearms regulations is one you might have missed. If finalized, it could fundamentally transform the way Americans buy guns.
The ATF’s proposed Non-Over-the-Counter rule would allow gun dealers to conduct many firearms sales entirely remotely, so eligible buyers could verify their identities online and have a gun shipped directly to their home, no in-person interaction required. It’s a move that has even rattled the gun industry’s own leading trade lobby.
Enter the president’s son. Donald Trump Jr. is a shareholder and board member of GrabAGun, a company that bills itself as the “Amazon of Guns” and boasts that it’s “uniquely positioned to capitalize on this potential opportunity.”
Currently, someone who orders a gun online generally must go in person to a federally licensed firearms dealer to verify their identity, undergo a background check, and eventually pick up their gun. Under the ATF’s proposed rule, eligible in-state buyers could verify their identity online, undergo a background check, and have a gun shipped directly to their home, without ever setting foot in a gun store.
The ATF estimates that as many as half of all gun buyers might choose to take advantage of fully remote sales.
GrabAGun has been positioning itself for a future where more gun sales happen this way. As the public face of the company, Trump Jr. has touted the ease of online gun sales “in an age where our right to bear arms is under constant attack from anti-gun politicians and woke corporations.”
“GrabAGun allows you to [buy a gun] the way you’d buy everything else, like you would on Amazon if you’re buying home décor or other goods,” he explained to Bloomberg last July, ahead of the company’s public debut on the New York Stock Exchange.
Months before the ATF unveiled its proposal, GrabAGun had already begun expanding into a new business designed to help firearms manufacturers sell directly to consumers. In January, the company launched PEW Logistics, a subsidiary that provides manufacturers with a “white-label direct-to-consumer fulfillment solution.” Four months later, the ATF announced its proposed rule expanding remote firearms sales.
Democratic Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal sounded the alarm about what the company knew, and when—and pressed the Department of Justice on whether Trump Jr.’s business ties influenced the proposed rule. “It appears that GrabAGun had information about the potential change in the regulatory landscape and made a series of business decisions to capitalize on the moment,” they wrote in a July letter to then-acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Trump Jr.’s spokesperson has maintained that the president’s son had “zero involvement in this particular decision.”
“Don is a lifelong businessman and vocal advocate of our Second Amendment rights,” Andrew Surabian said in a statement to Reuters. “He does not interface with the Federal Government as part of his role with any company that he invests in or advises.”
ATF Director Robert Cekada also pushed back on ethical concerns, asserting that the “ATF has had no engagement with any retailer in developing [the rule].” The ATF has framed the Non-Over-the-Counter rule as a way to modernize gun sales and take advantage of technical advances in remote identity verification.
The proposal has drawn alarm from anti-gun-violence advocates and even some members of the gun industry, who say that removing in-person encounters could make it harder to detect suspicious sales and easier for guns to reach the criminal market.
“This allowing of online gun sales is probably the most dangerous action taken by the US government to increase gun violence,” warned Jon Lowy, founder and president of Global Action on Gun Violence and a veteran gun violence prevention attorney.
“A brief video interaction cannot detect if the purchaser is actually an illegal straw purchaser buying for someone else, a gun trafficker just supplying the criminal market, somebody who’s intoxicated, somebody who is on drugs, someone who is clearly mentally unstable and dangerous,” Lowy said. “I really was shocked.”
The ATF and the gun industry’s largest trade organization, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), have partnered for more than 25 years on the “Don’t Lie for the Other Guy” campaign, educating dealers on how to identify and prevent straw purchases—when a “straw man” illegally buys a gun for someone else, one of the most common sources of gun trafficking, according to federal data.
Earlier this year, ATF Director Robert Cekada told the Senate Judiciary Committee that federally licensed firearms dealers are “our first line of defense in the fight against firearms trafficking.”
Now, the industry’s own trade group is warning that removing face-to-face encounters could undermine that role.
In August, the NSSF told the ATF that its membership was “overwhelmingly opposed” to the Non-Over-the-Counter rule, citing concerns that remote sales “would be exploited by bad actors to conduct illegal straw purchases.”
“When you have an online background check you lose the emotional point,” Florida gun dealer Marc Bernstein told Spectrum News 13. “A lot of the ways that we stop straw purchases are through conversations and we terminate the sale right away. And it happens pretty frequently.” Bernstein said that happens at least once a week.
The Non-Over-the-Counter rule is still under review and, if finalized, will likely be challenged in court. It’s unclear if a legal challenge would delay the rollout.
“I’ve spent most of my career trying to stop the flow of crime guns,” said Lowy, the gun control attorney.
“Then this whole other mechanism that makes it completely easy and seems largely untouchable is created—and it looks like there’s virtually nothing you can do about it.”
