特朗普政府大幅放松枪支管制

During his race for the White House, President Donald Trump pledged to expand Second Amendment rights nationwide. Now his administration is taking major steps to roll back gun restrictions put into place for public safety. Our justice correspondent Ali Rogan has more. On the earlier this year, the Justice Department unveiled a major roadmap to reduce regulations on purchasing firearms, arguing the changes would quote modernize gun policy.

Now the department is also taking more targeted actions going after Democratic-led states for their own gun restrictions. For more on the Trump administration's efforts to broaden Second Amendment rights. I'm joined now by Chip Brownlee. He's a staff writer at The Trace covering federal gun policy. Chip, thanks so much. Welcome to the Newshour. I want to ask you first about these rollbacks that the DOJ has announced.

What rules and policies would be implement would be impacted here. Yeah, so the ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has proposed a range of uh rollbacks, about 3 dozen in total. I would say most of the proposals that they have are actually pretty administrative. They update and modernize some of the um processes that gun dealers use, but there are a couple of things in there that are pretty significant.

Um, one that has gotten a lot of criticism from the gun reform side of things, uh is a is a rule that was intended to close the gun show loophole. The Trump administration has proposed rolling back that that rule. Um, and then there are some other things like reducing uh regulations on short-barrelled rifles and bump stocks, bump stocks being the um one of those devices that was used in the Los Las Vegas mass shooting in 2017.

Um, and some of those regulations are actually just bringing things back in line with what's the Supreme Court has said in terms of things like the bump stocks, um, but, uh, the big thing is the, the rule that uh you know, was intended to close the gun show loophole. There's another rollback that's caused some controversy, and that is reducing the restrictions on people with mental illness to own a firearm. That's upset some gun safety groups.

What kind of risks are involved with that rollback? Well, the ATF, um, the ATF itself actually said that there's a risk that rolling that rule back uh could result in mass casualty events. Um, I don't know how big of an impact that's going to be, because right now, federal law is that if you were involuntarily committed into a psychiatric institution, for example, you would lose your gun rights, and that, that remains the law.

This is a kind of clarifying essentially that if you were voluntarily entering yourself into a um into a facility that wouldn't count and then some other things about uh if you um have been previously uh you know, rule is not able to handle your own affairs, kind of removing some of that stuff, but this is a regulation and a rule that's been back and forth between the Trump administration an