Anti-Gunners Clutching Pearls Over Trump’s 2A Executive Order

The results of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s investigation into the Biden administration’s executive actions on guns and its defense of federal gn laws won’t be in for another couple of weeks, but anti-gun activists are already putting their own spin on what’s likely to emerge from her findings. 

Brady’s Kris Brown spoke to to WGN-TV about the potential impact of Trump’s executive action, as well as some of the other moves we’ve seen from his administration, including the shuttering of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. 

“There is no possible rationale for closing that office, unless what you want to do is simply ignore that gun violence is the number one killer of our kids, and to me, that is horrific because it doesn’t,” Brown claimed, adding, “Not having the office does not change that. It only worsens it.”

Brown’s comments are, of course, absolute nonsense. The biggest rationale for ending the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention is that it never really about reducing “gun violence”, but promoting gun control (and providing cushy federal jobs to anti-2A activists). 

It’s silly for Brown to claim that scrapping the office means that either “gun violence” or violent crime will increase. Reported homicides were already trending down when Biden created the office in the fall of 2023, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that anything Biden did through executive actions led to a further drop in reported homicides around the country last year. 

In addition to her bluster on Biden’s gun control office, Brown also tried to put her spin on the likely undoing of Biden’s executive actions on guns. 

[Brown] said Biden-era reforms like background checks and restrictions on who can purchase weapons, helped to strengthen public safety. Undoing them, she said, has the potential to endanger public safety.  

“We’re not a lawless nation, so there should be no reason, not to have laws that actually save lives,” Brown said. “In fact, laws like the Brady background check, which stands for a proposition that something like 97% of Americans agree with, that. If you go in to buy a firearm and you’re a convicted felon, you should be denied that firearm, right?”

Background checks on retail purchase of firearms won’t be going away as a result of Bondi’s examination of Biden’s EO’s, though we’ll hopefully see the formal rescinding of the ATF rule expanding who is “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms, which was put in place with the goal of requiring almost every gun owner who offered a single firearm from their collection for sale to obtain a federal firearms license. 

Brown failed to inform WGN or its viewers that the rule in question was already in legal jeopardy before Trump’s EO, along with the other attempts by ATF and the Biden administration to bypass Congress and enact new gun control laws in the guise of regulations. The Supreme Court has already struck down the bump stock ban imposed by the Trump administration, and they’re set to issue their ruling on the agency’s regulation treating unfinished frames and receivers as fully functional firearms later this spring. Legal challenges to the ATF’s rules on pistol stabilizing braces and forced reset triggers have also been largely successful in the lower courts, but those rules will hopefully be undone by Trump and Bondi in the months ahead. 

I’m sure that Brown is legitimately bothered by the likely demise of the Biden-era regulations foisted on gun owners and the firearms industry, but I suspect that what really frosts her cookies is the fact that the gun control lobby has lost its influence on the White House. Gun control groups like Brady, Everytown, and Giffords had no better friend in Washington, D.C. than Biden himself, while Trump has promised to protect our Second Amendment rights while using the DOJ to target violent offenders. The anti-gunners no longer have their perch inside the executive branch, but that’s cause for celebration, not consternation, for those of us who reject the idea that fighting “gun violence” has to stop and end with targeting lawful gun owners and our right to keep and bear arms.