WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is expected to roll back a range of Biden-era gun control measures, including a program to crack down on federally licensed gun dealers who falsify business records and skip customer background checks, according to two people briefed on the move.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, under pressure from gun rights groups, is likely to announce this week that she plans to eliminate the “zero tolerance” policy, put in place four years ago, that strips the federal licenses of firearms dealers found to have repeatedly violated federal laws and regulations, the people said.

Bondi plans to order Kash Patel, who is serving as FBI director and the interim leader of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, to review two other major policies enacted under the Biden administration, with an eye toward scrapping both. One is a ban on so-called pistol braces used to convert handguns into rifle-like weapons, and the second is a rule requiring background checks on private gun sales.

The moves come at a moment of chaos at a largely leaderless and rudderless ATF, whose small workforce has been partly redeployed to provide support for immigration raids around the country. Patel has spent most of his time running the FBI, and the Justice Department has proposed merging the gun agency with the Drug Enforcement Administration, a plan that has left the ATF’s career leadership demoralized. That, however, is unlikely to take place anytime soon.

President Trump Campaigns on Curtailing Gun Regulations

President Donald Trump campaigned on curtailing gun regulation. In February, he signed an executive order directing the Justice Department “to examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans” and other actions “to assess any ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.”

In late March, Bondi ordered the department’s civil rights division to open an investigation into the potential infringement of Second Amendment rights by officials in Los Angeles County, repurposing an investigative unit that had been used to expose racial discrimination and police violence by local enforcement agencies.

The three new actions, while more than symbolic, were neither unexpected nor likely to have major effect immediately.

Enforcement of the zero-tolerance policy has waned somewhat since Trump was elected. And federal judges have already frozen all or part of the rule involving pistol braces as well as the regulation imposing background checks on a shadow market of weapons sold online, at gun shows and through private sellers.

Move Represents U-Turn From Biden Administration

Taken together, the new moves represent an abrupt U-turn from efforts by the Biden administration, led by the former ATF director Steven M. Dettelbach, to stem the flood of unregulated semiautomatic handguns and rifles that have contributed to mass shootings and exacerbated the violent crime wave that peaked after the coronavirus pandemic.

“This administration inherited a violent crime rate at a 50-year-low — less than three months later they are now looking to roll back popular gun safety policies that keep communities safe,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a group founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Emma Brown, executive director of the gun safety group Giffords, accused Trump of giving his “seal of approval” to “reckless dealers who are willing to sell guns to traffickers and criminals.”

Gun owners and manufacturers celebrated the decision.

The Biden administration “purposefully suffocated the firearm industry,” Lawrence G. Keane, general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for firearms manufacturers, said in a statement.

He added: “This reckless policy throttled small businesses and drove many to shut down by threatening crippling administrative costs to fight against penalties for minor errors and infractions.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Glenn Thrush/Doug Mills
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