The bottom line
Pam Bondi’s past record on the Second Amendment is genuinely bad. That is not a controversial statement. But her record as Attorney General, evaluated on its own terms, has been substantively pro-gun in ways that would have been unimaginable under any previous administration. Both of those things are true at the same time, and pretending otherwise is not honest advocacy.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
Her record in Florida was not good
I want to be fair, and being fair means starting with the parts I cannot defend.
When Pam Bondi was Attorney General of Florida, she supported and actively helped implement the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act following the 2018 Parkland shooting. That law did three things that are constitutionally indefensible: it raised the minimum age to purchase a firearm from 18 to 21, it created Florida’s red flag law allowing courts to confiscate firearms without due process, and it included a bump stock ban.
On the age restriction, the text of the Second Amendment says “the right of the people.” At 18, you can vote, you can serve in the military, you can be tried as an adult for any crime, and you can be held to every obligation of citizenship. Courts that have actually applied Bruen honestly to this question have found that 18-to-20-year-olds are plainly within “the people,” and there is no founding-era tradition of excluding them from arms ownership. In fact, the founding era had compelled militia duty that applied to men in that exact age range. Bondi’s support for that restriction was constitutionally wrong.
On red flag laws, there is no way to dress this up. A court can issue a temporary order to confiscate your firearms without you being present, without you being able to face your accuser, and without any criminal charge being filed against you. The burden then falls on you to get your property back. That inverts due process entirely. Bondi did not just fail to oppose this in Florida. She actively campaigned for it and later defended it in court against NRA legal challenges.
She also supported Florida’s open carry ban throughout her tenure as AG. Bruen makes it clear that the Second Amendment protects carrying arms in public. Allowing concealed carry while banning open carry is not a constitutionally coherent position. You cannot ban one entire mode of carrying and claim you are respecting the right.
Gun Owners of America was right not to support her confirmation. That organization’s concerns were grounded in a real track record, not speculation. Anyone who told you otherwise was either uninformed or not being straight with you.
How to think about her now
Here is the thing about Pam Bondi that I think gets missed in a lot of the discourse around her: she is not really an ideologue. She is a very capable lawyer who fights hard for whatever position she is directed to take. As Florida AG, she was operating in a political environment where supporting post-Parkland gun control was seen as necessary, and she did it. As US Attorney General under Trump, she is operating in a different environment with different directives. The question is not whether Pam Bondi is a principled Second Amendment absolutist. She clearly is not. The question is whether the administration she is working for is using her in a pro-2A direction. And right now, the honest answer is yes.
That is not a fully satisfying answer. I understand why people want an AG who would be fighting for gun rights out of genuine conviction rather than institutional loyalty. I want that too. But we do not always get to choose between perfect and acceptable. Sometimes we choose between what we have and what we had under Merrick Garland. That comparison is not even close.
What she has actually done in office
The ATF’s zero tolerance policy under Biden was a disaster for the firearms industry. Beginning in 2021, any federal firearms licensee who committed any technical violation of any regulation, no matter how minor, had their license revoked. No second chances, no remediation, no proportionality. Under this policy, FFL revocations went from five in 2021 to 88 in 2022, to 157 in 2023, and 147 in 2024. Voluntary surrenders after inspections tripled in the same period. This was not about catching dangerous dealers. It was about using the administrative apparatus to destroy small gun businesses through paperwork enforcement.
Bondi repealed that policy in April 2025. She called it an “undue burden” on the Second Amendment, and she was right. That single action reversed a years-long campaign to strangle the firearms retail industry through regulatory harassment.
She also reactivated the gun rights restoration program under 18 U.S.C. § 925(c), which had been effectively dormant since the early 1990s when Congress defunded its implementation at the ATF. Bondi shifted the authority to grant firearms rights restoration away from the ATF and to the Attorney General directly, with her office now making final determinations on a case-by-case basis. The program is aimed at nonviolent offenders, and violent felons and sex offenders remain presumptively ineligible. In July 2025, Bondi stated plainly that for too long, Americans with certain criminal histories have been permanently stripped of a right that is constitutionally equal to free speech or voting. That is the right frame. Someone who lied on a welfare form or committed a white-collar offense two decades ago is not a danger to anyone. Stripping them of the Second Amendment for life was never constitutionally grounded, and this program starts to fix that.
She created the DOJ’s Second Amendment Task Force, charged with identifying unconstitutional gun regulations and coordinating enforcement actions to protect the rights of lawful gun owners. The jury is still out on how aggressive the Task Force will be over time, but its existence is significant. No previous administration created anything like it.
The Illinois amicus brief and why it changes everything
The biggest thing Bondi has done, and the thing I think genuinely matters most for the long-term trajectory of Second Amendment law, is what the DOJ did in Barnett v. Raoul, the Seventh Circuit challenge to Illinois’s Protect Illinois Communities Act.
Illinois passed PICA in 2023, banning so-called “assault weapons” including over a thousand previously legal firearms, and banning standard-capacity magazines defined as anything over ten rounds for long guns and fifteen rounds for handguns. These are not unusual or exotic firearms. AR-15s and their variants are the most popular rifle platform in the United States. Standard-capacity magazines are just the magazines that come with the guns. The Seventh Circuit had previously held in 2023 that “assault weapons” are by definition not protected arms under the Second Amendment, a position that is analytically incoherent under Bruen.
On June 13, 2025, the DOJ filed an amicus brief on behalf of the United States in the Seventh Circuit, arguing that PICA violates the Second Amendment because it bans arms that are commonly possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes. That is not remarkable by itself. What is remarkable is what came next. The DOJ petitioned the court for argument time and was granted it. On September 22, 2025, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon personally argued before a three-judge Seventh Circuit panel, urging the court to reject its own prior flawed framework and apply Bruen correctly.
This was the first time in the history of the United States Department of Justice that a sitting administration’s DOJ argued against a gun control law in federal court on behalf of gun owners. Not against a federal law. Against a state law. On behalf of the plaintiffs. This is not a minor bureaucratic detail. This is a structural shift in how the federal government positions itself relative to Second Amendment litigation.
For decades, gun rights advocates were fighting alone, with private organizations like the Firearms Policy Coalition, the Second Amendment Foundation, and the NRA Institute for Legislative Action carrying the full weight of this litigation. The federal government was either neutral or actively hostile. Now, at least in this administration, the DOJ is on the field arguing for us. Whatever else Bondi has done wrong in her career, she signed off on that brief and she put her Civil Rights Division chief in that courtroom.
Is she fast enough and aggressive enough
No. She is not moving as fast as I want, and I do not think the pace of action matches the severity of the constitutional crisis we are in when you look at the full scope of state-level gun bans, suppressor taxes, registration schemes, and sensitive place proliferation across blue states.
But I also understand why legal caution matters here. These filings are hundreds of pages long. Anti-gun judges are looking for any technical flaw they can use to toss a case on procedural grounds before it reaches the merits. A rushed or sloppy brief does more damage than no brief at all. Losing a case at the Seventh Circuit because of a drafting error would set back Second Amendment progress in that circuit by years. Slow and careful is not always the same as insufficient.
Pam Bondi is not the Second Amendment champion I would design if I were starting from scratch. Her past is what it is. But measured by what she has actually done in office since February 2025, the DOJ is more pro-Second Amendment right now than it has ever been at any point in American history. That is worth acknowledging honestly, even if it is not the full picture.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
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