The ATF just had the most pro-2A week in its history

The bottom line

On April 29, 2026, the Senate confirmed Robert Cekada as ATF director. The next day, standing alongside acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at DOJ headquarters, he announced 34 regulatory changes, every single one of them pro-Second Amendment. Acting AG Blanche called it the most comprehensive regulatory reform package in the history of the ATF. He was not exaggerating.

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This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.

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Not all 34 items are equal. Some are procedural housekeeping. Some are genuinely historic. The package as a whole signals that the federal government is treating the Second Amendment as a real right, and that the agency that has spent decades making life harder for law-abiding gun owners is now going out of its way to do the opposite. I have never been able to say that in my lifetime.

Here are the five changes I think matter the most.

The “engaged in the business” rule is dead

This one is probably the single biggest substantive win in the package. Under Biden’s ATF, the agency rewrote the definition of “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms so aggressively that a single private sale could theoretically trigger an unlicensed dealing prosecution. Think about what that means in practice: you go to a gun show, sell a rifle you no longer want, and you’re potentially a federal criminal. The rule was absurd on its face, and 28 state attorneys general led by Texas AG Ken Paxton said so. A federal court in Texas agreed and issued an injunction.

On April 24, 2026, the new DOJ dropped its own appeal in Texas v. ATF, letting that injunction stand. Now the ATF is formally rescinding the regulatory language that created the problem in the first place. When a federal agency voluntarily gives back enforcement power it fought hard to claim, that is extremely rare. The agency that was treating gun show attendees as criminal suspects is now acknowledging it had no business doing so.

The “willfully” standard is finally defined correctly

Federal law says the ATF can only revoke an FFL for “willful” violations. Sounds protective, right? In practice, under Dettelbach’s ATF, a dealer could lose a license over a single paperwork error, with the agency interpreting “willful” so broadly that honest mistakes became license-ending events. Courts spent decades fighting over what the word actually means.

The reform package proposes to bake the Supreme Court’s standard from Bryan v. United States directly into the regulations: a person acts willfully when they know their conduct is unlawful, even without knowing the specific statute. Director Cekada put it plainly when he announced the package. The ATF’s enforcement focus going forward is on willful violators and criminal actors, not inadvertent compliance issues by responsible owners and licensees.

That is a fundamental reversal of how the Biden-era ATF operated. Under Dettelbach, FFL revocations surged and dealers lost licenses over minor technical deficiencies that had no relationship to criminal conduct. Locking in the Bryan standard in regulation makes it much harder for any future administration to quietly revert to treating paperwork errors as moral equivalents of gun running.

Records retention: shutting down the backdoor registry

This one gets less attention than the brace rule or the “engaged in the business” reversal, and it should not. Right now, ATF records have no expiration. When an FFL goes out of business, all of its 4473 forms flow to the National Tracing Center and stay there permanently. The agency has collected hundreds of millions of records this way, effectively building a de facto gun registry through the back door.

The reform package proposes replacing indefinite retention with a finite window, either 20 or 30 years. I would prefer zero, and the proposal is still in a comment period with a deadline of August 4, 2026, so the final number matters. But even 20 years is a meaningful structural change. Once records age out, they are gone. The ATF cannot use out-of-business FFL data to build and maintain a searchable list of who owns what. That is exactly what federal law prohibits in the first place, and it is long past time the regulations reflected it.

The NFA transport rules were always indefensible

If you own a suppressor or an SBR, you know the absurdity I am talking about. Before this package, taking your legally registered NFA item across a state line required advance notice to the ATF. A form. Permission from the federal government to exercise your right to travel with property you paid $200 in taxes to own.

The new rules eliminate the notification requirement entirely for travel under one year. If you are going on a hunting trip, taking your suppressor to a range in a neighboring state, or moving temporarily for work, you no longer need to ask the ATF’s permission. Trips longer than a year require notice but not pre-approval.

This change is small in scope and enormous in principle. NFA owners are not criminals. They went through the most invasive background check process in civilian firearms ownership. The idea that they needed to tell the federal government every time they crossed a state line with their property was never justifiable.

The brace rule is formally rescinded

Yes, the courts already effectively killed the stabilizing brace rule. Garland v. VanDerStok and a series of circuit court losses made the 2023 rule largely unenforceable before this package arrived. But there is something important about the ATF voluntarily pulling the rule from the books rather than waiting to be forced.

The 2023 brace rule demanded that millions of Americans register, destroy, or surrender devices they had legally purchased after the ATF itself had approved them in writing for years. It was one of the clearest examples of arbitrary regulatory reversal in ATF history. Formally rescinding it acknowledges the agency behaved badly. It is precedent-setting in a way that a court loss is not.

What is missing, and I want to say this clearly, is any compensation or return program for the hundreds of thousands of braces that were surrendered or destroyed under the 2023 rule. Those people are not getting anything back. That is a real failure. But it does not change the fact that the formal rescission matters.

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What this actually means

I have been following gun law closely for years, and I have never seen an ATF announcement package like this one. Not under Bush. Not under either Trump term until now. The agency that gave us the brace rule, the “engaged in the business” overreach, and a record pace of FFL license revocations just stood up in front of cameras and announced it was going in the opposite direction on 34 separate fronts simultaneously.

Some of this is catching up with court losses. Some of it is political signaling by officials who want their jobs confirmed. I am not naive about that. But both Cekada and Blanche have staked public credibility on this package, and the regulatory changes that go through notice-and-comment will be much harder to unwind than an executive order or a policy memo. The “willfully” standard in particular, once codified in regulation, becomes part of the administrative record that any future director would have to formally justify reversing.

The Biden era treated FFLs like adversaries and gun owners like suspects, then spent four years finding new ways to make ownership more burdensome. This package walks all of it back. I will take it.