The Trump administration is quietly rewriting how Americans buy guns. One of the changes would remove the face-to-face moment that gun dealers say is how they catch illegal sales — and the president's son is positioned to make money from it.
Mother Jones reported on October 2 on the ATF's proposed "Non-Over-the-Counter" rule.
What the rule would do
Today, if you order a gun online, you generally still have to go in person to a licensed gun dealer. The dealer checks your ID, runs the background check, and hands you the gun.
Under the ATF's proposal, eligible in-state buyers could verify their identity online, get the background check done remotely, and have the gun shipped straight to their home — without ever walking into a gun store.
The ATF itself estimates that as many as half of all gun buyers might choose the fully remote option.
Why dealers say it's dangerous
The in-person sale is where a lot of illegal gun buying gets caught. A "straw purchase" — when someone with a clean record buys a gun for someone who can't legally have one — is one of the most common ways guns reach criminals, according to federal data cited by Mother Jones. For more than 25 years, the ATF and the gun industry have run a campaign together, "Don't Lie for the Other Guy," training dealers to spot exactly that. This year, ATF Director Robert Cekada called licensed dealers "our first line of defense in the fight against firearms trafficking."
Now the industry's own trade group is warning against the rule. In August, the National Shooting Sports Foundation told the ATF its members were "overwhelmingly opposed," saying remote sales "would be exploited by bad actors to conduct illegal straw purchases."
A Florida gun dealer, Marc Bernstein, told Spectrum News 13 that "a lot of the ways that we stop straw purchases are through conversations" at the counter — and that it happens at least once a week.
"A brief video interaction cannot detect if the purchaser is actually an illegal straw purchaser buying for someone else, a gun trafficker just supplying the criminal market, somebody who's intoxicated," said Jon Lowy, a longtime gun violence prevention attorney. He called it "probably the most dangerous action taken by the US government to increase gun violence."
The president's son
Donald Trump Jr. is a shareholder and board member of GrabAGun, a publicly traded company that calls itself the "Amazon of Guns." It has said it is "uniquely positioned to capitalize on this potential opportunity."
The timeline, per Mother Jones:
- January: GrabAGun launched PEW Logistics, a subsidiary offering gun makers a "white-label direct-to-consumer fulfillment solution" — shipping guns straight to buyers.
- Four months later: the ATF announced its proposed rule expanding remote gun sales.
- July: Democratic Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal asked the Justice Department whether Trump Jr.'s business ties influenced the rule, writing that GrabAGun appeared to have "information about the potential change in the regulatory landscape."
Trump Jr.'s spokesperson says he had "zero involvement in this particular decision." The ATF director says the agency "has had no engagement with any retailer in developing" the rule.
Part of a bigger rewrite
This isn't a one-off. Just last month, Trump's Justice Department decided the federal ban on selling handguns to 18-to-20-year-olds is unconstitutional and stopped criminally enforcing it, Mother Jones reports.
In Congress, Republicans are pushing the same direction. Lauren Boebert has a bill that would repeal the 78-year-old law keeping handguns out of the mail.
The rule is still under review, and if it's finalized, it will likely be challenged in court.
What the record shows
Trump's ATF has proposed a rule that would let gun buyers verify their identity online and have guns shipped to their homes with no in-person check — something the ATF estimates up to half of buyers might use, and that the gun industry's own trade group says its members are "overwhelmingly opposed" to because it invites straw purchases. Donald Trump Jr. sits on the board of GrabAGun, which launched a direct-to-consumer gun shipping business four months before the ATF announced the rule.
