Trump Administration’s Whiplash Approach to the Second Amendment

Let me start by saying that I’m grateful for what President Trump and his administration have done for gun rights. They’ve already done more to defend the Second Amendment than any administration in my lifetime, and I really do appreciate that.

But we also need to acknowledge that the bar wasn’t that difficult for the administration to clear. It’s not so much that they’ve been that great, but that everyone who came before them sucked even worse. That’s it.

And while I can appreciate what they’ve done, that doesn’t mean I’m beholden in some way to ignore the very real problems of how the administration approaches gun rights. And neither is Reason’s Jacob Sullum. 

He starts by reiterating the administration’s horrible response to the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, including Trump’s own comments on the topic, but also quotes from key members of the administration. It wasn’t a good look, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg, really.

By contrast, Trump’s authoritarian tough-on-crime instincts are longstanding and seemingly sincere, and they sometimes conflict with his relatively recent embrace of Second Amendment rights. That was clear during his first term, when he spoke favorably of banning “assault weapons,” requiring background checks for all gun transfers, and raising the minimum age for buying long guns. After the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, Trump demanded a bump stock ban that the Supreme Court ultimately overturned, deeming it beyond the statutory authority of federal gun regulators. He also expressed support for “red flag” laws, saying police should “take the gun first” and “go through due process second” when they think someone is dangerous.

During his second term, Trump sought to make up for those lapses. He issued an executive order aimed at “protecting Second Amendment rights,” and the Justice Department launched a litigation project for that purpose. As part of that project, the Justice Department challenged the District of Columbia’s “assault weapon” ban, arguing that a policy Trump had repeatedly embraced was clearly unconstitutional. The Trump administration also joined a challenge to Hawaii’s default rule against carrying guns on private property open to the public.

Trump and his underlings seem less inclined to worry about the Second Amendment when it protects people outside the MAGA coalition. In 2025, Justice Department officials toyed with the idea of prohibiting transgender people from owning firearms because they are “mentally ill”—a half-baked proposal that predictably alarmed all of the major gun rights groups.

While that idea apparently went nowhere, the Trump administration has steadfastly defended constitutionally dubious federal gun restrictions, including the National Firearms Act’s registration requirements, the Gun Control Act’s ban on gun possession by drug users, and the same law’s disarmament of people with nonviolent felony records. In all three cases, the NRA and other Second Amendment groups vigorously opposed the government’s arguments.

Sullum also brings up U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, who has regularly taken an anti-gun approach in her job. The latest example is her support for an en banc hearing on DC’s magazine ban case, even as her office has officially declined to defend it at such a hearing. Her brief sure reads like someone who wants the law to stand, which hints that she’s just following orders and doing so to the letter, if not the spirit of those orders.

Still, the truth is that this isn’t unusual for the Trump administration. It’s been downright schizophrenic at times, with the Civil Rights Division going after the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over permitting delays, but vigorously defending the NFA registration for short-barreled long guns and suppressors, even though the tax stamp–which the registry was supposed to only be a record of– was eliminated.

It’s gotten to the point that it’s hard to tell which DOJ is going to show up on any given case.

We voted for Trump because we wanted better, and while we’ve gotten more from the administration than what we’ve seen prior, that doesn’t mean we should be willing to settle for table scraps, either.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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