Editor’s note: Stefanie Feldman worked on the zero tolerance policy as a domestic policy advisor to President Joe Biden.
On Apr. 7, the Trump Administration announced its most significant action on guns to date: the termination of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF’s) policy of zero tolerance for gun dealers that willfully violate the law. This step is the first of many the Trump Administration will likely take to dismantle the Biden Administration’s efforts to curtail the flow of firearms reaching the hands of criminals. The action threatens public safety in the United States, as well as America’s diplomatic relationship with Mexico.
The Problem: Rogue Gun Dealers Supply Many of the Guns that End Up at Crime Scenes
Previous Democratic administrations generally advanced a two-pronged approach to reducing gun violence: (1) investing in law enforcement to arrest and prosecute shooters and (2) investing in community-based violence prevention and intervention strategies. The Biden administration added a third policy to this toolkit: a fervent focus on addressing the source of guns that end up in the hands of criminals. This supply-side firearms agenda meant that the U.S. government looked upstream to stop the gun traffickers, gun dealers, and gun manufacturers engaged in illegal or irresponsible acts that ultimately arm dangerous individuals.
For years, gun violence prevention experts and advocates have known that a relatively small number of bad actor gun dealers sell a disproportionately large number of the guns that law enforcement officials find at crime scenes. In 2003, the gun industry convinced Congress to restrict publication of crime gun tracing data in order to make it difficult to fully assess this problem. However, the most recent data (from 2000) shows that roughly 90 percent of guns found at crime scenes can be traced back to just 5 percent of gun dealers. While this percentage has likely shifted since 2000 due to the rising popularity of privately made firearms, the core point still rings true: most firearms dealers act responsibly and only a small number of bad actors are fueling the supply of firearms that land in the hands of criminals.
Selling a gun that ends up at a crime scene is not a crime. But Congress and the ATF have placed background checks, recordkeeping, and other requirements on federally licensed firearm dealers in order to minimize the risk that either gun traffickers or others prohibited from possessing firearms walk out of a dealer with a weapon. A licensed gun dealer that violates these requirements can face penalties including revocation of its license.
The ATF faces two key barriers to ensuring that dealers fulfill these requirements. The first barrier is that the ATF has financial resources to inspect only about 10 percent of gun dealers every year to assess compliance. Congress must appropriate more funds for the ATF to expand the number of inspections. The second barrier is that, even when inspections identify policy violations, the ATF too often lets dealers off the hook with a simple warning.
Shortly after Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, I was serving in the White House as a domestic policy advisor to the president and working with the ATF to find a way around this second barrier. In May 2021, USA Today and The Trace publicly exposed the extent of the problem using documents secured by the gun safety organization Brady through Freedom of Information Act requests. The outlets jointly published an investigation filled with compelling, detailed stories of federally licensed gun dealers that received just a warning after ATF investigations found egregious, illegal, and often repeated business practices, such as: selling firearms without running background checks, knowingly selling firearms to felons and domestic abusers, or conducting business with significant gaps in recordkeeping that made their inventories ripe for gun trafficking.
The reporting helped pave the way for a new policy.
The Solution: Zero Tolerance for Rogue Gun Dealers
In June 2021, President Biden announced the ATF’s new policy of zero tolerance for federally licensed firearms dealers. The policy, aimed at improving dealers’ compliance with federal requirements and cutting off key sources of crime guns, put every federally licensed gun dealer on notice that the ATF would revoke its license if the dealer willfully engaged in one or more of five activities: (1) refusing to allow an ATF agent to inspect the dealer, (2) transferring a firearm to someone prohibited from possessing a firearm (such as a felon or domestic abuser), (3) transferring a firearm without conducting a background check, (4) falsifying records or (5) failing to respond to a request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation for information related to tracing a firearm to its purchaser. The policy provided clear enforcement guidance to the ATF officials determining the consequences of dealer inspections.
While framed as “zero tolerance,” the ATF established two provisions to make the policy more lenient. First, the ATF Director could exempt a dealer from license revocation if the bureau identified certain extraordinary circumstances. The ATF established the extraordinary circumstances exception for cases such as when a mom-and-pop gun dealer is tricked by a criminal employee who was running a gun trafficking scheme out the dealer’s back door. White House policy advisors were nervous that the undefined extraordinary circumstances exception would defang the entire zero tolerance policy, but the design of the policy was ultimately the ATF’s call. Second, the bureau stipulated that dealers still had the right to an appeal, first to the ATF and then in a U.S. district court.
Once implemented, the zero tolerance policy led to a significant increase in ATF’s revocations of gun dealer licenses. In 2022, the first full year with the policy in effect, the number of license revocations tripled. The number of revocations continued to increase in 2023 and 2024. In 2024, the ATF revoked 195 dealer licenses. The ATF was revoking licenses after about 2 percent of inspections, the highest revocation rate in nearly 20 years. (Note: The Trump Administration has now deleted this license revocation data from the ATF website.)
While multiple factors impact crime rates, it is noteworthy that there was a historic decline in the number of murders in the United States from 2022 to 2024, a period coinciding with implementation of the zero tolerance policy and other steps intended to reduce gun crime. It is impossible to say how much the zero tolerance policy contributed to this trend. But by putting bad actor gun dealers out of business, the ATF slowed the flow of firearms into the hands of criminals.
Trump Administration Sided with the Gun Industry by Revoking Zero Tolerance
On Feb. 7, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Attorney General to review “rules promulgated” by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and ATF “from January 2021 through January 2025 pertaining to firearms and/or Federal firearms licensees,” including the “enhanced regulatory enforcement policy” – which was another name for the zero tolerance policy. The executive order did not come out of the blue.
The gun industry – including advocacy organizations such as the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) and Gun Owners of America – placed reversal of the zero tolerance policy at the top of their requests for the Trump Administration. NSSF argued that the zero tolerance policy targeted small businesses and led the ATF to revoke licenses for simple paperwork violations. Independent analysis by The Trace found this claim to be largely false. Still, the ATF clarified the policy in August 2024 to ensure it was effectively fulfilling its goal of excluding accidental violations of the law.
Tellingly, then Acting ATF Director Kash Patel announced the termination of the zero tolerance policy at an event on Apr. 7 hosted by the Gun Owners of America, which was the first group to publish the news online. (Patel, who remains the FBI director, was subsequently replaced at the ATF.)
The Trump administration is already eyeing other policies the gun industry seeks to end. In conjunction with the revocation of the zero tolerance policy, the DOJ announced that it was commencing a process to “revisit” two other key components of the Biden administration’s public safety agenda. The first is implementation of the Bipartisan Safer Community Act’s broadening of the category of gun dealers that have to run background checks. The second is a rule to regulate certain pistols equipped with stabilizing braces, which have been used in a string of mass shootings. Pistols with stabilizing braces are especially dangerous weapons that must be registered with ATF under the National Firearms Act.
Consequences for the U.S. and Mexico
Firearms traffickers or individuals who are not supposed to own firearms (such as felons and domestic abusers) will have easier access to guns as well, putting Americans’ lives at risk. Hopefully the nationwide trend of falling homicide rates will continue despite the Trump Administration’s policies. If not, revocation of the zero tolerance policy will be a key factor in the trend’s reversal.
The revocation of the zero tolerance policy also has implications for America’s diplomatic relationship with Mexico. In its lawsuit against U.S. gun manufacturers, the Government of Mexico alleges that a small number of gun dealers in the United States are selling almost all of the guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico. At the beginning of the Trump Administration, Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico in an attempt to secure commitments to stop the flow of fentanyl across the border into the United States. Claudia Sheinbaum, the President of Mexico, wrote that she reached an agreement with Trump and that Mexico would address the flow of fentanyl into the United States. In return, Sheinbaum wrote, the United States would address the flow of firearms into Mexico.
Sheinbaum will likely continue to demand U.S. action to stop the trafficking of firearms into Mexico. But the Trump administration’s reversal of the zero tolerance policy will likely only worsen the firearms trafficking problem – both across the border and within the United States.
Editor’s note: This piece is part of the Collection: Just Security’s Coverage of the Trump Administration’s Executive Actions