Gun Owners Must Vote So Congress And Trump Can Continue To Deliver

Authored by Aidan Johnston via Gun Owners of America,

In November 2024, gun owners elected a president who promised to restore the Second Amendment and ushered in the most pro-gun Congress in modern history. Two years later, the results are not in dispute. No president in American history has done more to restore lost Second Amendment rights than Donald J. Trump. And no Congress has restored more Second Amendment rights than the 119th.

Just after taking office, President Trump signed Executive Order 14206, "Protecting Second Amendment Rights" - the first executive order in American history devoted specifically to restoring lost gun rights. President Trump ordered a wholesale review and repeal of every unconstitutional Biden-era gun control.

To fulfill President Trump's main campaign promises to gun owners, Acting ATF Director Kash Patel repealed the Biden ATF's "Zero Tolerance" policy that was shutting down gun stores and expanding ATF's billion-record gun registry. Trump-appointed Judges also struck down Biden's "Pistol Brace" rule, Biden's "Frame and Receiver" rule, and Biden's "Engaged in the Business" rule.

More recently, ATF proposed more than three dozen regulatory reforms, including reducing National Firearms Act burdens on law-abiding gun owners and their spouses, easing interstate travel protections for gun owners crossing state lines, allowing guns to be shipped straight to your door, and reducing the records currently kept in ATF's illegal gun registry for the first time since its creation in 1968. While Gun Owners of America provided constructive criticism to the Trump administration on several of the other proposed regulatory reforms, GOA is continuing to work with the Trump administration to improve the drafts before a final rules are enacted.

The Department of Justice also launched a new process to restore federal firearms rights to individuals who have been prohibited, reviving an authority Congress had defunded for more than three decades. And the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion declaring the bans on handgun sales to 18-to-20-year-olds, on interstate sales of handguns, and certain federal gun-free zones unconstitutional.

The DOJ's Civil Rights Division, led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, created a Second Amendment Section which filed more than a dozen lawsuits challenging unconstitutional state and local gun laws. Acting Attorney General Dhillon joined Gun Owners of America in defending our lawsuit against Illinois's assault weapons ban. And her Division sued Denver, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. over assault weapons bans, Colorado over magazine capacity limits, Los Angeles, the Virgin Islands, and Minnesota over permitting delays, San Jose over unconstitutionally high concealed carry fees, California over its Glock-style pistol ban and handgun roster, and Montgomery County, Maryland over public carry restrictions. The Civil Rights Division also recently opened investigations into Middletown and Waterbury, Connecticut and Pennsauken, New Jersey over permitting delays, and put Glendale, California on notice over its nearly $2,000 concealed carry fees.

The Department of Veterans Affairs stopped reporting veterans to the FBI's background check system simply because they needed a fiduciary to manage their benefits - a three-decade-old practice that had disarmed more than 270,000 veterans without a judge, a hearing, or any finding of dangerousness. After GOA worked with Congress to prevent VA from disarming any more veterans during the Biden administration, GOA worked with VA to finish the job: restoring gun rights to all the veterans who had been unlawfully disarmed, deleting them from the NICS system, and no longer treating them as criminals for having a fiduciary help manage their benefits.

The Department of Health and Human Services removed the declaration of gun violence as a so-called public health crisis, restored self-defense statistics to the CDC's website, fixed errors in those statistics, and stopped requesting gun control research funding for CDC and NIH in its annual budgets.

The Department of War, under Secretary Pete Hegseth, issued a memorandum directing installation commanders to allow service members to carry privately owned firearms on base with a presumption of approval - ending what Hegseth called a de facto gun-free zone policy on military installations.

The Department of Treasury ended the weaponization of agencies like FinCEN that were targeting gun owners and eliminated the use of "reputational risk" to de-bank the firearm industry. And the Office of Comptroller of the Currency exposed nine of the largest banks in the United States for discriminating against the firearm industry, prompting major apologies and policy reversals.

The Department of Commerce reversed a Biden-era rule that would have restricted civilian firearms exports to thirty-six nations.

The Department of the Interior, under Executive Order 14429, is moving to reopen national monuments to hunting and protect traditional lead ammunition after President Biden tried to institute a backdoor lead ammunition ban.

And USPS initiated rulemakings to allow gun owners to carry firearms for self-defense in post offices and even ship handguns by mail, upending nearly a century of gun control in response to GOA lawsuits.

Meanwhile, pro-gun Republicans in Congress cut ATF's budget by more than $160 million total. And Republicans in Congress led by Rep. Andrew Clyde passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act with GOA-backed language that eliminated the $200 National Firearms Act tax on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and "any other weapons."

Congress repealing the NFA tax is what made GOA's legal victory in Silencer Shop v. ATF possible, where a Trump judge held that NFA gun registration could no longer be enforced against GOA members for untaxed suppressors and short-barreled firearms. After our victory in district court, President Trump ordered the Department of Justice not to appeal. So on August 13, 2026, GOA members and Trump-endorsed candidates Brandon Herrera and Wesley Verdell completed the first suppressor transfers without registration, fingerprints, or Form 4s in 92 years. Under the leadership of Director Cekada, ATF expanded GOA's injunction to apply not just to GOA members but nationwide. A law that infringed on the rights of our fathers, our grandfathers, our great-grandfathers no longer applies to all Americans.

That's what winning looks like.

Now consider the alternative.

If Kamala Harris had won in 2024, the "Zero Tolerance" policy would still be stripping licenses from small gun shops, and ATF's illegal registry would still be growing at a historic rate. The Department of Justice would still be fighting to regulate gun parts using the "Frame and Receiver" rule. A new "Pistol Brace" rule would have been issued to ban short-barreled rifles and shotguns again, after the old one was struck down on only procedural grounds. And ATF would still be targeting gun owners pursuant to the "Engaged in the Business" rule - as it did under Biden's ATF Director Dettelbach, when gun owner Brian Malinowski was killed in a pre-dawn raid on his own home.

Harris' campaign website also promised a so-called "assault weapons" ban, universal background checks, and red flag laws. The Democratic platform called for repealing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act to bankrupt the gun industry. And Kamala would have vetoed any bill eliminating the NFA tax and signed any bill to restrict our God-given rights.

That is exactly what we face if we lose this November.

If Democrats take the House, the Senate, or both, there will be no future reconciliation bill to eliminate the remaining NFA taxes. There will be no pro-gun appropriations riders. Democrats have historically used the National Defense Authorization Act as a vehicle for red flag gun confiscation orders. We would face Congressional Review Act resolutions targeting every pro-gun rule the administration has issued.

And if a pro-gun Supreme Court justice - Alito, Thomas, or any other - leaves the bench, we will have lost the chance to confirm another originalist who believes that our Second Amendment rights shall not be infringed. The Supreme Court, which now has a majority of pro-gun and Trump-appointed justices, is set to hear Viramontes v. Cook County on December 2nd, deciding whether AR-15 bans are constitutional. If the Court strikes down the bans in California, Hawaii, New York, and elsewhere, anti-gun Democrats will use that as their excuse to pack the Supreme Court and overturn Heller, Bruen, and everything good that has followed.

The rights that we have been able to restore by working with President Trump and a pro-gun Congress over these past two years may not survive if anti-gunners are able to take control of Washington.

So remember: the Second Amendment is on the ballot. GOA urges every gun owner who cares about their right to keep and bear arms, and every gun activist who wants to help GOA continue restoring Second Amendment rights in Washington, D.C. over the next two years, to get out and vote this November.

Aidan Johnston is the Director of Federal Affairs for Gun Owners of America, a non-profit grassroots lobbying organization with over two million members nationwide.