DOJ Launches ‘Second Amendment Task Force’ to Guard Gun Rights

The legal professional normal mentioned the president directed her to suggest a plan of motion designed ’to guard the Second Modification rights of all People.’

The Division of Justice (DOJ) has introduced the institution of a process power geared toward defending the Second Modification rights of law-abiding Americans.

“For too lengthy, the Second Modification, which establishes the elemental particular person proper of People to maintain and bear arms, has been handled as a second-class proper. No extra,” Lawyer Basic Pamela Bondi wrote in a Tuesday memorandum to all DOJ workers.

“President [Donald] Trump has made defending the Second Modification rights a precedence for this administration,” she mentioned.

The legal professional normal mentioned the president directed her to suggest a plan of motion designed “to guard the Second Modification rights of all People.”

Bondi mentioned the prime goal of the “Second Modification Job Power” is to develop insurance policies and authorized methods to “advance, shield, and promote compliance with the Second Modification.”

The duty power, chaired by Bondi, will encompass employees members from her workplace and from the Deputy and Assistant AGs’ places of work, from the Solicitor Basic’s workplace, the Civil Division, the Civil Rights Division, the Legal Division, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), and the FBI.

Personnel from further companies could also be summoned to help within the process power’s operations as wanted.

Trump’s Govt Order

The duty power serves to implement Trump’s Govt Order 14206, “Defending Second Modification Rights,” which instructed the legal professional normal to evaluate the entire Biden administration’s firearms-related actions.

In a Wednesday press launch, Bondi mentioned the “prior administration positioned an undue burden on gun house owners and distributors by concentrating on law-abiding residents exercising their 2nd Modification rights.”

On Monday, the ATF mentioned it had repealed President Joe Biden’s Enhanced Regulatory Enforcement Coverage. The 2021 initiative—often known as the “Zero Tolerance Coverage”—set strict inspection requirements for arms sellers and allowed the ATF to revoke licenses over minor clerical errors that have been beforehand thought-about excusable.

“This Division of Justice believes that the 2nd Modification just isn’t a second-class proper,” Bondi mentioned in an ATF press launch.

“The prior administration’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ coverage unfairly focused law-abiding gun house owners and created an undue burden on People in search of to train their constitutional proper to bear arms—it ends right this moment,” she mentioned.

The DOJ and the ATF are additionally planning to revise the “stabilizing brace rule” and the boundaries for figuring out who is taken into account “engaged within the enterprise” of promoting firearms.

The stabilizing brace rule sought to reclassify weapons with connected stabilizing braces—equipment initially designed to assist individuals with disabilities shoot pistols extra comfortably—as short-barreled rifles, which suggests stricter rules. Critics argued the rule turned thousands and thousands of law-abiding gun house owners into potential felons in a single day by reclassifying their legally bought pistols.

A MCK pistol brace for a handgun is displayed with firearm equipment on the market on the Crossroads of the West Gun Present on the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa, Calif., on June 5, 2021. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP by way of Getty Pictures

The 2024 “engaged within the enterprise” of firearms dealing rule expanded the definition of who qualifies as a firearms vendor beneath federal regulation, which critics mentioned blurred the road between personal gross sales and industrial dealing, doubtlessly criminalizing hobbyists.

Then-acting ATF Director Kash Patel, who was succeeded on the ATF by Military Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll on Wednesday, referred to as the measures “a pivotal step towards restoring equity and readability in firearms regulation.”

The DOJ mentioned it would work with gun rights organizations, gun producers, and authorized consultants over the approaching months to make sure that the polices align with People’ constitutional rights.