Trump's ATF Keeps Biden's Gun Rule — Betrayal or Deep State?

Trump's ATF just stabbed gun owners in the back — and the agency isn't even pretending otherwise.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has signaled it will keep Biden's 2022 frames and receivers rule alive, requesting stays in two major federal lawsuits — VanDerStok v. Bondi and Defense Distributed v. Bondi — while it drafts a so-called 'replacement' regulation. Translation: the rule stays on the books, and law-abiding gun owners stay in the crosshairs.

Biden's rule redefined what counts as a firearm 'frame or receiver,' gutting a cornerstone of Second Amendment commerce and criminalizing parts and kits that Americans have legally bought, sold, and built for decades. Federal courts — including the Fifth Circuit — had already battered this rule legally. Gun rights groups dragged it to the Supreme Court in VanDerStok, and the fight was far from over.

Now the ATF under Trump is pumping the brakes. Instead of using those court cases to drive a stake through Biden's regulatory overreach, the agency is asking judges to pause proceedings while bureaucrats tinker with a new version of the same unconstitutional framework.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's DOJ is going along with it. That should alarm every gun owner in America.

This is the deep state doing what it always does — outlasting elections, slow-walking change, and counting on gun owners to lose interest. Career ATF bureaucrats built this rule. They have zero incentive to dismantle it and every incentive to preserve their own power over the firearms industry.

Defense Distributed and the VanDerStok plaintiffs didn't spend years in federal court so the Trump ATF could hit the snooze button. They fought to kill this rule — permanently.

Gun owners handed Republicans a mandate in November. That mandate included dismantling every piece of Biden's anti-gun regulatory agenda — not repackaging it with a new cover page.

Call your representatives today. Demand Congress defund any ATF effort to rewrite or replace the frames and receivers rule. The only acceptable outcome is full repeal — not a rebrand.