OPINION:
A new CBS/YouGov poll shows that 70% of Americans think President Trump is keeping his campaign promises. On Friday, Mr. Trump did just that for gun rights.
Calling the Second Amendment an “indispensable safeguard of security and liberty,” the president signed an executive order directing new Attorney General Pam Bondi and his other executive officers to review “all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies.”
With only 30 days to do this review, it will be a tall order to track down all violations of people’s right to keep and bear arms. Mr. Trump is mainly focused on Biden administration regulations regarding “ghost” guns, zero tolerance, background checks and a national gun registry.
“Ghost” guns (homemade guns) have been around since before the United States became a country. To deal with the “grave threat to public safety” these guns supposedly pose, the Biden administration mandated serial numbers on all gun parts.
“When police officers retrieve a gun at a crime scene, they can trace it to the buyer and consider him as a suspect,” argues a brief from the Biden administration. “It will help to ensure that law enforcement officers can retrieve the information they need to solve crimes.”
In theory, police can trace weapons back to criminals using serial numbers from registered guns left at crime scenes.
In real life, gunmen leave firearms at a crime scene only when they are seriously injured or killed. With both the criminal and the weapon at the scene, police can solve the crime without relying on serial numbers.
On the rare occasions when criminals do leave registered guns behind, those guns are typically not registered to the actual perpetrator.
The United States has tried registration systems for decades without success. Police in Hawaii, Chicago, Maryland and New York have registered serial numbers for decades and can’t point to any crimes that this has enabled them to solve. Even entire countries such as Canada haven’t had success.
States have wasted tens of millions of dollars on these registration programs. This money could have gone to crime-fighting methods we know to be effective. The reality is that gun registration systems may be helpful only for confiscating guns and going after gun dealers.
President Biden sold a “zero tolerance” policy as a measure for prosecuting “rogue gun dealers” who “knowingly” sell guns to violent criminals. Of course, no one wants dealers secretly selling guns to criminals out of the back of their stores, but Mr. Biden’s policy isn’t about that. Instead, it makes trivial and inconsequential paperwork errors into grounds for dealers to lose their licenses and go out of business.
Tom Harris of Sporting Arms Co. in Lewisville, Texas, is a disabled father of five who made two small paperwork mistakes 16 and 17 years ago. Under the Obama administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives cleared Mr. Harris, who hasn’t made a single paperwork mistake since then.
After the Biden administration reopened closed cases, Mr. Harris had to create a crowdfunding page to cover his legal costs.
By the middle of 2023, Mr. Biden’s zero-tolerance for minor paperwork errors and typos had put nearly 2,000 dealers out of business.
The 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act aimed to impose background checks on virtually all gun sales, even those between private individuals. The Biden administration thought this would enable the creation of an even more complete national gun registry.
Although federal law explicitly prohibits the creation of a federal firearm registry, ATF published a 125-page regulation in April 2024 that would allow for the tracking of virtually everyone who obtains a gun.
By early 2021, ATF had created a digital database containing almost 1 billion firearm transactions. The Biden administration pressured credit card companies to track firearm purchases so the government could fill in the blanks. Bank of America has given customers’ gun purchase data to the FBI without being presented with a warrant or probable cause.
So many government actions are cloaked in the rhetoric of crime prevention but are aimed at impeding gun ownership. Mr. Trump’s team will have its work cut out over the next month as it begins to reverse a damaging legacy of disarming Americans and putting gun dealers out of business.
• John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Department of Justice’s office of justice programs and office of legal policy.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.