You can finally ask for your rights back. Now go count the slots.

The bottom line

Attorney General Todd Blanche signed a final rule on August 17 that revives 18 U.S.C. § 925(c), the federal gun rights restoration process Congress strangled in 1992. It hit the Federal Register on August 20 and takes effect September 21. This is a real win and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the rule gives the government 30 million eligible applicants, 5,500 slots in the first public window, and no deadline whatsoever to decide a single application.

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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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The law never went away. The money did.

I want to be precise here, because the sloppy version of this story is everywhere and it gets the mechanism wrong.

Nobody created a new power on August 17. Section 925(c) has been sitting in the Gun Control Act since 1968, and it says a prohibited person “may make application to the Attorney General” for relief from federal firearms disabilities. That sentence has been law my entire life. It sat there through both Bush administrations and the first Trump administration, and none of them used it.

What Congress did in the fiscal year 1993 appropriations bill was refuse to fund ATF’s processing of those applications, and then repeat that rider every year since. The statute stayed on the books and the office that answered it went dark. Then the Supreme Court closed the other exit in 2002. United States v. Bean held that ATF’s failure to act on an application wasn’t a “denial” a federal court could review. So the right to apply survived on paper while the only door stayed locked, and no judge could be made to open it.

Remember that trick. It’s about to matter again.

The path back ran through the Second Amendment Task Force that Trump ordered on February 7, 2025. An interim rule in March 2025 moved § 925(c) authority out of ATF, which was the whole point, since ATF was the agency Congress had specifically defunded. A proposed rule followed on July 22, 2025. The program now lives at the Office of the Pardon Attorney under the name Federal Firearm Rights Restoration.

Getting it out of ATF was dismissed at the time as a paperwork shuffle. It was the load-bearing move. The appropriations rider aimed at one agency, and DOJ walked the function to a different one.

What the rule actually says

The final rule runs 40 pages at 91 FR 54054 and creates a new 28 CFR part 107. The specifics matter more than the headline.

All nine prohibited categories under § 922(g) can apply. Felons, fugitives, unlawful drug users, people with mental health commitments, certain aliens, dishonorable discharges, citizenship renunciants, and the domestic violence prohibitions. Eligible to ask isn’t the same as likely to win, but the front door is open to the entire list rather than a curated slice of it.

The burden is on you and it’s double. You have to satisfy the Attorney General both that you’re not likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety and that relief wouldn’t be contrary to the public interest. Two separate findings, both yours to prove.

The rule then sorts people into presumptive disqualifiers. Homicide, rape, trafficking, kidnapping, terrorism, and similar violent conduct sit in a permanent category. Drug trafficking, threats of violence, explosives, and certain firearms offenses carry a ten year clock that runs from conviction or from the end of any part of the sentence. Most other felonies plus misdemeanor assault, battery, stalking, and threatened violence carry five years. Current status disqualifies you outright while it lasts, which covers anyone awaiting sentencing, serving any part of a sentence including probation, parole, or unpaid restitution, or sitting in a diversion program. A prior denial starts its own clock.

Here I have to correct something I said in the video, because I had it wrong and the distinction cuts in gun owners’ favor. I described the permanent category as never being able to apply. That isn’t what the rule does. Every one of those five classes is written as a rebuttable presumption, and the operative phrase in each is that applications “will therefore be denied, absent extraordinary circumstances.” DOJ spends pages in the preamble defending that escape hatch against commenters who wanted it gone, and says explicitly that it expects relief to be granted in appropriate cases. A permanent presumptive disqualifier is a very steep hill. It’s not a locked door, and anyone in that category should understand the difference before they assume there’s no point trying.

One more piece of good drafting. Under § 107.10(b) the Attorney General looks at the conduct underlying your offense rather than what your state happened to name it. Anyone who’s watched a nonviolent paperwork felony carry a scary sounding label knows why that matters.

The marijuana carve-out is the sleeper

Almost nobody is covering this part, and I think it’s the most consequential thing in the document.

The proposed rule treated unlawful drug use as a presumptive disqualifier. Commenters hammered it, focusing almost entirely on marijuana, and pointed out that roughly two thirds of states have legalized it while casual drinkers face no such presumption. Then the Supreme Court decided United States v. Hemani this year and held that a defendant’s regular marijuana use didn’t by itself establish that he was dangerous.

DOJ moved. The definition of “controlled substance” in § 107.1 now reads that it “does not include marijuana,” and the drug-use presumption in § 107.50(c) only reaches controlled substances as defined in that section. The Department went further than Hemani required and excluded marijuana addiction too, on the practical ground that it can’t reliably sort users from addicts on paper. Applicants and their character references no longer have to swear the applicant isn’t a marijuana user.

Millions of people in states where marijuana is legal are federally prohibited under § 922(g)(3) and mostly don’t know it. This rule stops that status from creating a presumption against them.

Now the part that should worry you

Here’s the arithmetic. DOJ says roughly 30 million Americans are federally prohibited. The Department’s own estimate in the rule is 330,000 applications in year one.

The staging schedule on justice.gov opens the application to invited candidates on September 25, 2026. The public window opens November 4, 2026 for the first 5,000 candidates. On January 4, 2027, another 500 candidates can apply and the $30 fee kicks in.

Five thousand five hundred slots against 330,000 expected applicants. I understand a pilot. You don’t staff an office like this by throwing the doors open on day one, and I’d rather they get the first few thousand decisions right than drown. Read it as a pilot and it’s defensible.

What isn’t defensible is the other half.

The rule sets no deadline for deciding anything. That was raised in the comments. Sixteen state attorneys general pushed on it. DOJ’s answer in the preamble is that “setting a timeline for decisions at this stage would be premature and speculative,” and that the Department “continues to decline to commit itself to timeframes for decisions.” It also notes, correctly, that § 925(c) itself imposes no timeframe.

Read that against the history I opened with. Section 925(c) was never repealed. It was killed by an office that stopped answering, and by Bean holding that silence isn’t a denial you can take to a judge. A rule that revives the process while refusing to bind itself to any clock has rebuilt the exact machine that failed the first time. A future administration that dislikes this program doesn’t need to repeal a word of it. It just needs to slow down.

The one hedge worth noting is that DOJ agreed to issue a written explanation of the basis for each decision. That’s not nothing. A reasoned denial is reviewable in a way that indefinite silence never was, and that concession may end up being what keeps this program honest.

Two other limits worth knowing. Relief is federal only and doesn’t touch state prohibitions, so a grant doesn’t hand you a carry permit in a state that says no. And grants get published by name in the Federal Register, which is a real privacy cost that applicants should weigh going in.

Where I land

I didn’t expect this from a Justice Department this year, and I especially didn’t expect it early. Restoring rights to people with felony convictions polls badly outside our world. There’s no press win in it. Blanche did it anyway, in his first weeks, which tells me something useful about the next couple of years.

So take the win. Then watch the clock that DOJ refused to set. If the first 5,000 applications get real decisions in a reasonable time, this becomes one of the most significant Second Amendment reforms of the decade. If they sit in a queue, we’ll have learned that § 925(c) can be killed twice the same way.