Course Correction: The DOJ Has Come a Long Way Since President Tapioca Left Office

 

The U.S. Department of Justice is reported to be opening a new dedicated Second Amendment Rights Section inside the Civil Rights Division. This marks a historic course correction in federal policy and highlights the Trump Administration’s continued effort to assess ongoing infringements on Second Amendment rights. According to reporting, the new office will open this week and focus on investigating state and local laws or policies that improperly limit the right to keep and bear arms.

President Donald Trump signed his Presidential Executive Order Protecting Second Amendment Rights back on February 7, 2025, instructing U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to review all presidential and agency actions taken between January 2021 and January 2025 that “purport to promote safety” but infringed on the rights of law-abiding citizens. That includes rules issued by the DOJ and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, classifications of firearms and ammunition, regulatory enforcement policies and even reports issued by the former taxpayer-funded White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention that just pushed gun control.

In other words, for the first time, the Civil Rights Division is directed to treat the Second Amendment as what it is: a civil right deserving active protection, not a second-class right that must constantly give way to regulatory experimentation.

A Sharp Right Turn

The contrast with former President Joe Biden’s White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention is remarkable. Created in September 2023 and overseen by Vice President Kamala Harris, that office was explicitly designed to coordinate “gun violence prevention” across the federal government, drive new executive actions on gun policy and implement a whole-of-government attack on the lawful and highly regulated firearm industry. It pushed measures like expanded use of so-called “red flag” laws that deny Due Process rights, pressured states to create their own “gun violence offices” and reinterpreted who counts as being “engaged in the business” of selling firearms.

Staffed by a former lobbyist for Everytown for Gun Safety and operated as a taxpayer-funded gun control shop inside the White House, the office never addressed criminal misuse of firearms. Instead, it left fingerprints on efforts to cut funding for school hunter-education programs and on controversial attempts to pressure manufacturers through coordinated litigation strategies — treating the Second Amendment as a problem to be managed.

Conversely, the DOJ’s new Second Amendment Rights Section starts from the premise that the right to keep and bear arms is a freedom to be protected. It has been tasked with enforcing constitutional guarantees when state and local officials slow-walk concealed carry permits, weaponize licensing schemes and otherwise treat law-abiding gun owners and federally licensed retailers as adversaries rather than citizens or engage in lawfare against lawful firearms businesses through unconstitutional gun control-backed laws that try to circumvent the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.

Rolling Back Biden-Era Overreach

The new DOJ Second Amendment Protection office is only one piece of a broader pro-Second Amendment agenda already taking shape pursuant to the president’s Executive Order. The ATF earlier confirmed it scrapped the Biden-era “Zero Tolerance” enforcement policy and replaced it with a fairer administrative action framework. License revocations due to minor, clerical paperwork errors are no longer the default, and firearm retailers who lost their licenses under the old policy are invited to reapply under the new standard.

At the White House level, President Trump did exactly what the firearm industry had urged: he closed the Office of Gun Violence Prevention within days of taking office, ending an unprecedented experiment in embedding gun-control activism inside the West Wing. That closure was followed by the removal of a federal public-health advisory that had labeled “gun violence” a national crisis — an advisory the Biden administration used to justify treating lawful firearm ownership as a disease to be cured instead of a right to be respected.

Just as important, this administration has begun exposing and unwinding the misuse of taxpayer dollars to finance gun-control lobbying. Earlier this year, an investigation sparked by the Department of Government Efficiency revealed U.S. foreign-aid channels were used to funnel public money through intermediaries to gun-control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Giffords. Voters were promised transparency and accountability; they are now seeing the receipts. That effort dovetails with a broader re-evaluation of federal grants that had been steered toward community-violence programs closely aligned with the gun control lobby, many of which are now being redirected or ended.

Taken together, these moves show a clear pattern: President Trump is not merely pausing Biden-era policies; he is systematically rolling back those that treated law-abiding gun owners and the lawful, highly regulated firearm industry as the problem.

DOJ’s New Office & Industry

For manufacturers, distributors, retailers and ranges, the creation of the Second Amendment Rights Section matters in practical, day-to-day ways. While Biden-era enforcement campaigns that turned minor clerical errors into “gotcha” revocations are being reassessed, the ATF has been instructed to align its regulatory posture with the Constitution, not the wish lists of gun control organizations.

Equally important, the Civil Rights Division now has an institutional home for cases in which state or local officials abuse licensing and permitting authority to deny ordinary citizens their rights. DOJ has already shown it is willing to investigate jurisdictions accused of slow-walking concealed-carry approvals and imposing excessive fees and delays after Bruen. The new office is designed to expand that work and give gun owners, retailers and shooting ranges somewhere to turn when their rights are targeted through back-door regulation.

For years, gun-control advocates have used the language of “public health” and “violence prevention” to cloak aggressive restrictions in neutral-sounding terms, culminating in a White House office with the sole mission to advance policies aimed at limiting lawful firearm ownership. The Trump administration’s classification of the Second Amendment as a core civil right — backed by an executive order, concrete ATF reforms and now a dedicated DOJ section — is a long-overdue reminder that constitutional liberties do not sit below bureaucratic preferences on the federal organization chart.

The firearm industry will continue to do what it has always done: promote responsible ownership, invest billions in conservation, focus on firearm safety and serve the lawful market that makes exercising Second Amendment rights possible.

The DOJ’s new gun rights office is a positive, welcomed sign that Washington, D.C., is finally beginning to recognize our efforts are part of the solution.

 

Larry Keane is SVP for Government and Public Affairs, Assistant Secretary and General Counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation.