The analysis exactly as it was written, reviewed and stored. The tabs before this one re-cut this same text into sections; the writer refuses to publish a re-cut that does not reproduce it character for character, so nothing here is added, dropped or reworded.
WHAT IS AT STAKE
Twenty-seven words: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." For most of American history the Supreme Court said very little about them, and the decision most often cited from that long silence is United States v. Miller, decided in 1939. Since 2008 the Court has said a great deal, and the outer boundary of what any government in this country may do about firearms is now drawn by a short line of decisions rather than by any statute: Heller in 2008, McDonald in 2010, Caetano in 2016, Bruen in 2022, Rahimi in 2024, and two more handed down in June 2026. Seven decisions, in eighteen years.
Two questions sit underneath every fight on this issue, and they are not the same question.
The first is what the right covers. Which arms, carried where, by whom, and on what showing may the government take them away. That question is being answered right now, one weapon and one prohibited category at a time, by a method the Supreme Court adopted in 2022 and has been adjusting ever since. A great deal of it is genuinely open, including whether an entire category of commonly owned rifles is protected at all. The Court agreed on June 30, 2026 to decide that.
The second is whether the government may accomplish through private hands what it is forbidden to do itself. That question gets far less attention and it is the one StumpWatch treats as decisive, because much of the operating machinery of American gun regulation runs through private parties. A federally licensed dealer, not the government, runs the background check and creates and keeps the record of who bought what. A property owner, not the government, decides in some States whether a permit holder may cross a threshold armed. And in one documented case a state regulator urged banks and insurers to cut ties with a firearms advocacy organisation, which produced a unanimous Supreme Court decision discussed further down this page. Those three mechanisms are not equally well established and this page does not treat them as if they were: the first two are statutory and structural, the third rests on allegations a court took as true at the pleading stage.
StumpWatch's position, stated as a position and not as law, is that a private party carrying out the government's programme is an agent of the government, and that constitutional protections follow the conduct rather than the badge. The test we apply to every issue on this site is the same one here: would this be a constitutional violation if a government official did it directly? If it would, it is the same violation when an authorized agent of the government does it instead.
One thing should be said plainly at the outset, because it is where this issue differs from most. StumpWatch's editorial lens favours rights and civil liberties, and on guns that lens does not point in one partisan direction. It points toward a robust Second Amendment. It also points toward due process for the person the state wants to disarm, toward the nonviolent offender carrying a lifetime disability for a decades-old conviction, toward the state-licensed cannabis user who commits a federal felony by owning a shotgun, and against a government that regulates by pressuring the banks rather than by passing a law. Those commitments do not always agree with each other, and where they collide this page says so rather than picking whichever answer is convenient.
What follows separates three things and keeps them separate: what courts have actually held, what is genuinely open, and what we argue the law should be. The third is ours. It is not law, it is labelled, and no ruling changes it.
WHAT THE LAW ESTABLISHES TODAY
District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), holds that the Second Amendment codified a pre-existing "individual right," 554 U.S. at 579-81, 592, protecting the ability to keep, for lawful purposes, the kinds of weapons in common use. That settled a question that had been open for two centuries.
Heller is also the source of nearly every limit the other side of this argument relies on. The same opinion described a set of measures as "presumptively lawful," 554 U.S. at 627 n.26, and the Sixth Circuit, reading that passage in 2024, records the list as longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons, laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, and laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. United States v. Williams, No. 23-6115 (6th Cir. Aug. 23, 2024). Heller separately said its opinion did not "clarify the entire field," 554 U.S. at 635.
Anyone reading this page should notice how much work that single paragraph of dicta has done for eighteen years. It is not a holding. It has nonetheless supplied the constitutional footing for felon disarmament, for sensitive-places laws, and for dealer licensing and recordkeeping, in hundreds of decisions. In 2024 the Sixth Circuit wrote that "Our nation's historical tradition confirms Heller's assumption that felon-in-possession laws are 'presumptively lawful.'" That opinion was read in the court's own text for this revision.
McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010), makes the right applicable to the States. A passage constantly cited for more than it is worth appears at 561 U.S. 786, and a reader should know exactly what it is. It is not an opinion of the Court. The running head on that page of the United States Reports reads "Opinion of Alito, J.", because the discussion at that point commanded four votes rather than five. What it says, in full, is that "We made it clear in Heller that our holding did not cast doubt on such longstanding regulatory measures as 'prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill,' 'laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.'" An earlier version of this page quoted that sentence as the Court's and cut it off after the word "felons." Both errors are corrected here: it is a four-Justice plurality, and it names the mentally ill in the same breath as felons. That second point matters, because the mental-health categories are the ones ATF proposed to redefine by rule in May 2026.
Caetano v. Massachusetts, 577 U.S. 411 (2016), is a brief per curiam. This page previously understated it, and then, in correcting that, quoted it from the wrong place. The sentence "The Massachusetts court's explanation for upholding its law contradicts this Court's precedent" is the Held line of the Reporter's syllabus at 577 U.S. 411. It is not the Court's writing, and it is the same defect this page identifies in its own earlier treatment of Hemani two sections below. The per curiam's own words, at 577 U.S. 412, are: "For these three reasons, the explanation the Massachusetts court offered for upholding the law contradicts this Court's precedent." On that ground the Court granted certiorari, vacated the judgment of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and remanded. The reasoning was Heller's, and the per curiam framed it that way in its opening sentence: "The Court has held that 'the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding,'" citing District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 582 (2008), and Heller had rejected the proposition "that only those weapons useful in warfare are protected." So Caetano applies Heller's holding that "arms" reaches weapons that did not exist in 1791, and vacates because the state court's reasoning was inconsistent with it, rather than deciding the point afresh. What it did not decide is that stun guns are protected: it sent the case back rather than holding the law invalid. An earlier version of this page said the decision held nothing affirmative on the question and leaned on it for nothing. The first half of that was wrong, and the true limit is narrower than the correction first made it.
New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), replaced the means-end balancing the courts of appeals had built after Heller. In the Sixth Circuit's description, "The Bruen Court rejected the use of tiered scrutiny," requiring instead that the government justify a regulation by showing it consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation. Bruen invalidated New York's discretionary standard for a public-carry licence. It did not abolish licensing as such, and this page does not claim it did. The Court said so itself, in the opinion of the Court, in the footnote that has done more work in the lower courts than most holdings: "To be clear, nothing in our analysis should be interpreted to suggest the unconstitutionality of the 43 States' 'shall-issue' licensing regimes." 597 U.S. at 38-39 n.9. The same footnote carries the qualification that is usually dropped: "because any permitting scheme can be put toward abusive ends, we do not rule out constitutional challenges to shall-issue regimes where, for example, lengthy wait times in processing license applications or exorbitant fees deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry." An earlier version of this page's summary attributed that reservation to Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence. It is the Court's own, and correcting it matters most on the surface most people read.
A phrase that runs through the prohibited-person litigation needs pinning down, because this page previously got its provenance wrong in a way that inflated it. Heller described "the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home," 554 U.S. at 635. Bruen used the phrase in the opinion of the Court more than once, and an earlier correction to this passage found only some of them. It is at 597 U.S. 26, where the Court quotes Heller for the proposition that the Second Amendment "surely elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms" for self-defense. It is at 597 U.S. 70, in the conclusion, where the Court says American governments have not required "law-abiding, responsible citizens" to demonstrate a special need in order to carry arms in public. And it is in footnote 9, at 597 U.S. 38-39. Those are the three appearances in the opinion of the Court; the phrase also appears once in the syllabus, at 597 U.S. 6. McDonald did not use it at all. It appears exactly once in volume 561 of the United States Reports, at 561 U.S. 886, in Justice Stevens's dissent, quoting Heller. An earlier version of this page cited it to McDonald at 561 U.S. 790 and to Bruen at 597 U.S. 31; the phrase is on neither page. It is dicta in Heller and it is a holding nowhere. The Supreme Court has since said as much itself, and that is the authority this page previously asserted without: in Rahimi the Court rejected "the Government's contention that Rahimi may be disarmed simply because he is not 'responsible.'" It went on: "'Responsible' is a vague term. It is unclear what such a rule would entail. Nor does such a line derive from our case law." 602 U.S. at 701.
United States v. Rahimi, 602 U.S. 680 (2024), is the first case testing the new method against a modern federal statute, 18 U.S.C. section 922(g)(8), which disarms a person subject to certain domestic-violence restraining orders. The Court upheld the provision as applied: a person whom a court has found to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed. Rahimi also loosened Bruen in the lower courts, which had begun demanding an exact historical twin. The Sixth Circuit summarised the change as follows: "Rahimi emphasized that firearm regulations need not have a historical 'twin' to be valid." Rahimi separately restated the facial-challenge standard, quoting United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 745 (1987): a challenger must "establish that no set of circumstances exists under which the Act would be valid." 602 U.S. at 693. An earlier version of this page gave that citation as 144 S. Ct. at 1898; the official reporter citation is used here, and in the official text the passage sits in the body of the opinion of the Court rather than in a footnote.
Two features of Rahimi's holding are load-bearing and are routinely dropped when it is described. The disarmament it upheld followed a judicial finding about a particular person, and it was temporary. A third is dropped almost as often, and this page dropped it. Section 922(g)(8) is conjunctive: it reaches a person subject to a court order that (A) issued after a hearing of which the person had actual notice and at which the person had an opportunity to participate, (B) restrains the person from harassing, stalking or threatening an intimate partner or child, and (C) either includes a finding of a credible threat to physical safety or by its terms explicitly prohibits the use, attempted use or threatened use of physical force. An earlier version of this page quoted only subparagraph (A), which made the provision look far more like a bare status trigger than it is. The Court's analysis, it said itself, "starts and stops with Section 922(g)(8)(C)(i)," and it expressly declined to decide whether regulation under the alternative in (C)(ii) is also permissible.
WHAT THE SUPREME COURT DECIDED IN JUNE 2026
Two decisions handed down seven days apart moved this issue more than anything since Bruen, and both are narrower than the coverage of them. Both opinions were read in the Court's own text for this revision, which is why they can now be quoted where an earlier version of this page could only describe them.
UNITED STATES v. HEMANI, No. 24-1234, 608 U.S. (2026), decided June 18, 2026. Ali Hemani was investigated over suspected terrorism-related activity, cooperated, surrendered a gun he kept at home, pointed agents to marijuana on the property, and told them he used marijuana about every other day. Relying on that admitted use, the government prosecuted him under 18 U.S.C. section 922(g)(3) for possessing a gun while an unlawful user of a controlled substance. The district court dismissed the indictment, the Fifth Circuit affirmed, and the Supreme Court affirmed too.
A note on how that holding is stated, because an earlier version of this page got it wrong in a way worth naming. That version introduced a sentence as "The holding, in the Court's own words," and then quoted: "The government's prosecution of Mr. Hemani under [section] 922(g)(3)'s unlawful user provision is inconsistent with the Second Amendment." That sentence is the "Held" line of the syllabus, and the first page of every slip opinion carries a notice saying the syllabus "constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader." The characterisation was accurate; the attribution was not. The Court's own words, at the close of Justice Gorsuch's opinion, are these: "faced with all these shortcomings in the government's submission, we cannot say it has carried its conceded burden of showing its prosecution of Mr. Hemani complies with the Second Amendment. The judgment of the Fifth Circuit is affirmed."
The reasoning matters as much as the result. The government defended the statute by analogy to historical laws disarming the habitual drunkard, and the Court found the analogy failed. Around the founding, the Court wrote, a habitual drunkard was, as one court put it, someone who "for any considerable part of his time [was] intoxicated to such a degree as to deprive him of his ordinary reasoning faculties," and "A regular or even frequent drinker did not usually fit the bill." And, critically for everything else on this page, on the government's account section 922(g)(3) "automatically divests an individual of his constitutional right to bear arms the moment he becomes an unlawful user and until he ends his drug use—all without any pre-deprivation process." The original ends on an em-dash, which an earlier version of this page replaced with a comma. The dash is doing work, because what follows it is the whole objection.
Now the limits, which the Court set out itself. "In many respects, this case is a narrow one. We do not address efforts to ban addicts, see n. 2, supra, or those presently intoxicated, from possessing a firearm. We do not address other prophylactic laws Congress might adopt after determining that users of a particular drug pose a special risk of misusing firearms. See n. 6, supra. We do not address 18 U.S.C. section 922(g)(1)'s provision disarming individuals convicted of felonies (often including drug-related ones). Ibid. We do not even address whether the government could bring a prosecution under section 922(g)(3) accompanied by individualized proof that the defendant's use of marijuana (or any other drug) renders him a danger to himself or others. Or proof that a certain drug always renders its users dangerous because of its potency or for some other reason. None of those issues is before us and we do not pass on them either way." Section 922(g)(3) is still on the books and still enforceable on other facts.
The lineup is worth stating in full, because a fractured Court is easily reported as a clean one. Justice Gorsuch wrote for the Court, joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Thomas, Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Jackson. Justice Thomas also filed a concurrence, raising a ground the Court did not reach: that as a matter of original meaning and the Court's precedents, section 922(g)(3) appears to exceed Congress's enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce. Justice Jackson filed a concurrence, joined by Justice Sotomayor. Justice Alito, joined by Justice Kagan, concurred only in the judgment. So the judgment was unanimous and the Court produced four separate writings, which is a signal about how much of the reasoning commands seven votes.
WOLFORD v. LOPEZ, No. 24-1046, 609 U.S. (2026), decided June 25, 2026. This is the more important case for the question this page treats as central, and its posture is commonly misdescribed. The District Court enjoined enforcement of Hawaii's rule as applied to private property open to the public. The Ninth Circuit reversed that injunction, 116 F.4th 959. The Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit and remanded. So the accurate description is that the Supreme Court held the rule cannot stand and sent the case back, not that the statute was finally struck from the books in that judgment.
The substance. At common law, opening property to the public implies a licence to enter unless the owner gives notice otherwise. In the Court's words, "After Bruen, Hawaii and four other States singled out in that decision flipped this default rule." Hawaii made it an offence for a permit holder to carry on private property open to the public unless the owner had affirmatively said yes. The Court found that unsustainable: "In short, Hawaii's law severely hampers the ability of a law-abiding citizen to exercise the right Bruen recognized."
The State's historical analogues did not persuade the Court. Of the last of them it wrote: "Finally, we come to the State's most remarkable analogue, an 1865 Louisiana statute that made it unlawful 'for any person or persons to carry fire-arms on the premises or plantations of any citizen, without the consent of the owner or proprietor, other than in lawful discharge of a civil or military order.'" An earlier version of this page cut that quotation off before its final clause. Two further things about that statute belong here and were missing. The Court identified it as one provision of Louisiana's Black Code, a law that, like the rest of that Code, "was designed to control black labor" and "restricted the ability of blacks to feed themselves on open land." And the Court rejected it on a ground that has nothing to do with its pedigree: "Because this statute was neither widespread nor widely accepted, it carries no weight."
The vote was six to three, not seven to two. Justice Alito wrote for the Court, joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. Justice Barrett filed a concurrence, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch as to Part II-B. Justice Kagan filed a dissent. Justice Jackson filed a dissent, joined by Justice Sotomayor. An earlier version of this page listed all three dissenters correctly in one paragraph and then said two Justices dissented in another.
Justice Kagan's ground was also misdescribed here, and the correction cuts against a claim this page was making about the method. Her dissent is not historiography. It is two paragraphs long and it resolves the case on Rahimi's principles test: "The key question is whether the challenged regulation is 'consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.'" She would uphold the Hawaii law because it reflects the same perceived harms as colonial and founding-era statutes, and she then declines the history fight in terms: "That conclusion is enough for me to resolve this case, without addressing Bruen's step-one inquiry or the use at step two of Louisiana's Black Code." So on the most recent Second Amendment merits decision, one of the three dissenters expressly refused to litigate the history at all.
WHAT THE FEDERAL STATUTES ACTUALLY DO
Almost nobody who argues about guns argues about the statutes, and the statutes are where the machinery is. Every provision quoted in this section was read for this revision in the current text published by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel or, for regulations, in the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations.
THE PROHIBITED CATEGORIES. 18 U.S.C. section 922(g) makes it unlawful for a person in an enumerated category to ship or transport a firearm or ammunition in interstate or foreign commerce, or to possess one in or affecting commerce. That commerce element is the jurisdictional hook and it is itself a live line of challenge. The categories include a person "who has been convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year," a person "who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance," and, in subsection (g)(8), a person subject to a qualifying domestic-violence restraining order on the three conjunctive conditions set out earlier on this page.
Two features of section 922(g)(1) are worth stating precisely because they are widely misunderstood. It is not limited to violent offences: the trigger is the authorised sentence, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year, which sweeps in a great many nonviolent state felonies. And it has no expiry. The disability is for life unless it is removed.
THE AGE LIMIT, STATED CORRECTLY. 18 U.S.C. section 922(b)(1) forbids a licensee from selling or delivering "any firearm or ammunition to any individual who the licensee knows or has reasonable cause to believe is less than eighteen years of age, and, if the firearm, or ammunition is other than a shotgun or rifle, or ammunition for a shotgun or rifle, to any individual who the licensee knows or has reasonable cause to believe is less than twenty-one years of age." An earlier version of this page described the higher threshold as applying to "a handgun or handgun ammunition." The statute is broader than that: it covers everything other than a shotgun or rifle. And the earlier description dropped the scienter element entirely, which is the part that decides whether a licensee has committed an offence at all.
THE REGISTRATION STATUTE THAT DOES EXIST. 26 U.S.C. section 5841(a) provides that "The Secretary shall maintain a central registry of all firearms in the United States which are not in the possession or under the control of the United States," known as the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record. The National Firearms Act's definition of a firearm at 26 U.S.C. section 5845(a) reaches eight numbered categories: short-barrelled shotguns, weapons made from shotguns, short-barrelled rifles, weapons made from rifles, any other weapon, machineguns, silencers and destructive devices. There is, in plain statutory text, a federal firearms registry. It covers a subset. What that registry now rests on, after two changes in the last thirteen months, is the subject of the next section, and an earlier version of this page described it in terms that are no longer accurate.
THE DEALER SYSTEM, AND WHO MAY LOOK AT THE RECORDS. 18 U.S.C. section 923(g)(1)(A) requires licensees to keep records of importation, production, shipment, receipt, sale and other disposition of firearms, and lets the Attorney General inspect them on a warrant supported by reasonable cause. That is only half of it, and the half usually quoted. Section 923(g)(1)(B) provides that the Attorney General "may inspect or examine the inventory and records of a licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, or licensed dealer without such reasonable cause or warrant" in three situations: "in the course of a reasonable inquiry during the course of a criminal investigation of a person or persons other than the licensee"; "for ensuring compliance with the record keeping requirements of this chapter," either "not more than once during any 12-month period" or "at any time with respect to records relating to a firearm involved in a criminal investigation that is traced to the licensee"; and when needed "for determining the disposition of one or more particular firearms in the course of a bona fide criminal investigation." Warrantless access to these records is the ordinary case, not the exception.
A correction about that provision belongs here rather than in a footnote, because an earlier version of this page had it exactly backwards twice. The twelve-month clause is a CEILING, not a floor. It caps how often the government may use the compliance route, and an earlier version of this page twice described dealer records as open to warrantless inspection "at least annually," which the statute nowhere provides. The accurate statement is less tidy and worse for the government, and it has to be counted exactly, because the correction this page first made overshot in the other direction. The subparagraph has three routes, not four, and they are the three numbered above. The compliance route, section 923(g)(1)(B)(ii), is the only one carrying a number, and the number is a ceiling: inspection "not more than once during any 12-month period" under subclause (I), except that under subclause (II) it is available "at any time with respect to records relating to a firearm involved in a criminal investigation that is traced to the licensee." That "at any time" language is a limb of the compliance route itself, not a separate criminal-investigation door. The two criminal-investigation routes, in subparagraphs (i) and (iii), carry no numerical limit at all. So the cap sits on the least intrusive of the three doors, and the least intrusive door has its own uncapped exception written into it.
HOW LONG THE RECORD LIVES, AND WHERE IT GOES. 27 C.F.R. section 478.129(b) currently provides that "Licensees shall retain each Form 4473 until business or licensed activity is discontinued, either on paper, or in an electronic alternate method approved by the Director, at the business premises readily accessible for inspection under this part." ATF proposed on May 6, 2026 to replace that with a fixed term, stating that it "is considering either 20 or 30 years for the specified period," 91 Fed. Reg. 24413. And 18 U.S.C. section 923(g)(4) sets out three destinations, not one: "Where a firearms or ammunition business is discontinued and succeeded by a new licensee, the records required to be kept by this chapter shall appropriately reflect such facts and shall be delivered to the successor. Where discontinuance of the business is absolute, such records shall be delivered within thirty days after the business discontinuance to the Attorney General. However, where State law or local ordinance requires the delivery of records to other responsible authority, the Attorney General may arrange for the delivery of such records to such other responsible authority."
The age of that retention rule is a fact this page previously left out, and leaving it out made a proposal look like an erosion when it is closer to a restoration. Indefinite retention is not the historic federal rule. It was created by ATF Final Rule 2021R-05F, 87 Fed. Reg. 24746 (Apr. 26, 2022), effective August 24, 2022, which replaced a regime under which licensees were required to retain transaction records for a minimum of twenty years and to submit twenty years of records on going out of business. The Congressional Research Service describes the change in exactly those terms. So the rule ATF proposed to change in May 2026 is three years old, and a twenty-year term would be a partial return to what preceded it rather than a novel weakening. That cuts against the way this page framed the proposal, and it belongs on the page for that reason.
THE BACKGROUND CHECK, AND WHAT IT KEEPS. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, Pub. L. 103-159 (November 30, 1993), created the national instant criminal background check system, run by the FBI, which is why a private licensee stands between every retail buyer and the transaction. 18 U.S.C. section 922(t)(2) provides that if the transfer would not violate the relevant provisions, the system shall assign a unique identification number, give it to the licensee, and "destroy all records of the system with respect to the call (other than the identifying number and the date the number was assigned) and all records of the system relating to the person or the transfer." On a cleared purchase, the federal check is required by statute to leave nothing behind.
THE MOST RECENT MAJOR STATUTE. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, Pub. L. 117-159 (June 25, 2022), made the largest federal firearms changes in decades. It built an enhanced background-check process for buyers under twenty-one, created a federal straw-purchasing offence, addressed the definition of being engaged in the business of dealing firearms, funded state crisis-intervention programmes, and altered the treatment of misdemeanour crimes of domestic violence. The section-by-section mapping of those changes was not verified for this revision and is therefore not given.
THE WAY OUT, ON PAPER, AND WHY IT DID NOT WORK. 18 U.S.C. section 925(c) provides that a person prohibited under section 922(g) may apply to the Attorney General for relief from federal firearms disabilities, and that "the Attorney General may grant such relief if it is established to his satisfaction that the circumstances regarding the disability, and the applicant's record and reputation, are such that the applicant will not be likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety and that the granting of the relief would not be contrary to the public interest." A denial may be taken to a federal district court for review. An earlier version of this page rendered that as relief that "follows if it is established" that the applicant is not dangerous. It does not follow. The verb is "may," the finding must be made "to his satisfaction," and the Supreme Court has described the Attorney General as possessing "broad discretion as to whether to grant relief." That last clause has also not meant what it appears to mean. In United States v. Bean, 537 U.S. 71 (2002), a unanimous Court held that an actual decision by ATF on an application is a prerequisite to judicial review. What happened to the provision in practice is set out further down this page.
THE LIMIT ON RULEMAKING. 18 U.S.C. section 926(a) provides that "No such rule or regulation prescribed after the date of the enactment of the Firearms Owners' Protection Act may require that records required to be maintained under this chapter or any portion of the contents of such records, be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States or any State or any political subdivision thereof, nor that any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established." Read that sentence twice, and note the word an earlier version of this page dropped. It is "No SUCH rule," and the word points back to the opening of the same subsection, which authorises the Attorney General to prescribe "only such rules and regulations as are necessary to carry out the provisions of this chapter." The bar constrains a rule or regulation. It is not a constitutional guarantee and it does not bind Congress.
WHAT CHANGED IN THE PAST YEAR, AND WHY MOST OF THIS PAGE HAD TO BE REWRITTEN
An analysis can verify that a statute says what it is said to say and still be wrong about the law, because a provision can be accurate on the page and inoperative in fact. Six independent review passes over this analysis found no invented case and no invented quotation, and then found that a whole class of statements here had never been checked for whether the provision was still doing anything. Four are set out below. Each was verified for this revision in the enrolled act, the current Code, the Federal Register or the court's own judgment.
THE NATIONAL FIREARMS ACT TAX IS NOW ZERO FOR ALMOST EVERYTHING IT COVERS. An earlier version of this page said the National Firearms Act "does not ban the weapons it covers; it registers and taxes them." Half of that is no longer true. Pub. L. 119-21, title VII, section 70436, enacted July 4, 2025 and titled "Reduction of transfer and manufacturing taxes for certain devices," zeroed the transfer tax and the making tax rather than only one of them, and did it in three separate amendments. Subsection (a) rewrote 26 U.S.C. section 5811(a), which now reads that the transfer tax shall be "(1) $200 for each firearm transferred in the case of a machinegun or a destructive device, and (2) $0 for any firearm transferred which is not described in paragraph (1)." Subsection (b) rewrote 26 U.S.C. section 5821(a) in parallel terms for the making tax, which is now "(1) $200 for each firearm made in the case of a machinegun or a destructive device, and (2) $0 for any firearm made which is not described in paragraph (1)." Subsection (c) added a conforming sentence to 26 U.S.C. section 4182(a) deeming any firearm described in section 5811(a)(2) to be one "on which the tax provided by section 5811 has been paid," which preserves an existing exemption from the separate manufacturers excise tax now that the transfer rate is zero. The prior text imposed $200 on every transfer, with a $5 rate for any other weapon. The amendments apply to calendar quarters beginning more than ninety days after July 4, 2025. Six of the eight categories in section 5845(a) therefore carry neither a transfer nor a making tax: short-barrelled shotguns and rifles, weapons made from them, any other weapon, and silencers. They are still registered. They are simply no longer taxed, and by volume they are most of what the registry holds. One of the Act's taxes was not touched at all, and an earlier version of this page hid that by calling the two that were zeroed "both of the Act's taxes." There are three. 26 U.S.C. section 5801(a) imposes an annual special occupational tax on every importer, manufacturer and dealer in National Firearms Act firearms, at $1,000 a year for importers and manufacturers and $500 a year for dealers, with subsection (b) reducing the higher rate to $500 for small importers and manufacturers. Pub. L. 119-21 contains no occurrence of "5801" or "5802" anywhere in its text, and the current Code, read for this revision in the version in effect on August 10, 2026, records section 5801's last amendment as Pub. L. 100-203, section 10512(g)(1), December 22, 1987. The district court said the same in describing the 2025 Act: Congress did not "change the $500 or $1,000 special occupational tax on importers, manufacturers, and dealers of NFA firearms." That surviving tax is not a detail. It is what the government argued the whole registration scheme still rests on, and the next paragraphs set out that argument and what the court did with it.
AND A FEDERAL COURT HAS NOW HELD THAT WITHOUT THE TAX THE REGISTRY EXCEEDS CONGRESS'S POWER. On August 5, 2026, in the Northern District of Texas, Judge James Wesley Hendrix entered final judgment for the plaintiffs on their enumerated-powers claims in two consolidated cases, not one: the lead case, Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, No. 6:25-CV-056-H, and a related case consolidated with it, Jensen v. ATF, No. 6:26-CV-227. An earlier version of this page named only the lead case, and the version after that reported a conflict in the number without resolving it, because the final judgment gives it once as 6:26-CV-277. It resolves, and not by counting which spelling appears more often. The memorandum opinion uses 6:26-CV-227 as a working record locator rather than a caption: it cites documents inside that docket by number and pin cite, as at "No. 6:26-CV-227, Dkt. No. 19 at 5-15." A number mistyped in the caption could not also be the number under which the court repeatedly retrieves specific filings and quotes their contents. So 227 is the docket and the judgment's 277 is a typographical error, and this page states it as settled rather than leaving a reader with two numbers and no way to choose. Its reasoning is the direct consequence of the change above: "In 2025, Congress eliminated the NFA's transfer and making taxes for four categories of firearms: short-barreled shotguns, short-barreled rifles, silencers, and a final, defined group of miscellaneous firearms. Because today's NFA does not generate any revenue from untaxed firearms, its regulatory provisions cannot be upheld under the taxing power." The court's four categories and the six statutory categories given above are the same items counted two ways, and neither number is wrong: section 5845(a) lists short-barrelled shotguns and weapons made from shotguns separately, at paragraphs (1) and (2), and short-barrelled rifles and weapons made from rifles separately, at (3) and (4), while the court merges each pair. The court concluded "that the challenged NFA provisions exceed Congress's Article I enumerated powers and are therefore unconstitutional," and, "At the parties' urging," did not reach the Second Amendment claims, which were dismissed as abandoned. The judgment permanently enjoins enforcement of 26 U.S.C. sections 5812(a)-(b), 5822, 5841(a)-(c) and (e), and 5861(b)-(f), together with 27 C.F.R. sections 479.62(a)-(d) and 479.84(a)-(d), "as to untaxed firearms against the plaintiffs and, where applicable, the plaintiffs' agencies, political subdivisions, members, and customers--both current and future." An earlier version of this page stopped that list there, and the judgment does not. It separately enjoins two further provisions, 26 U.S.C. sections 5842(b) and 5861(i), as to the Jensen plaintiffs alone, those being the marking provisions only that set of plaintiffs challenged. And it carves out an exclusion in its own words: "The Court's permanent injunction does not extend to the NFA's regulation of 'any other weapon' as it relates to the Jensen plaintiffs," citing 26 U.S.C. section 5845(a)(5) and (e). So one of the six statutory categories that lost its transfer and making taxes in 2025 is expressly outside the relief for the plaintiffs who sought the widest version of it.
THE GOVERNMENT'S ANSWER, AND WHY THE COURT REJECTED IT. That holding was opposed, and an earlier version of this page reported the ruling without the argument against it, which left a decision running in this page's own direction looking unopposed. The government's principal answer was the tax that survived. It argued that the challenged provisions still aid enforcement of the special occupational tax, so there is revenue after all: in the court's account of the contention, "those provisions still aid enforcement of a different tax in another section of the NFA: the special occupational tax on businesses that transact in covered firearms." The court answered it twice, once under the taxing power and again under the Necessary and Proper Clause, and conceded the premise while doing so: "To be sure, the special occupational tax is itself a valid taxing-power statute," citing Sonzinsky v. United States, 300 U.S. 506, 513-14 (1937). Its ground was that the two are separate machinery: "the regulatory requirements at issue have always been understood to support collection of the now-extinct transfer and making taxes—not the special occupational tax. That tax has its own regulatory scheme, which no one challenges here." It placed that scheme in the occupational registration mandate of 26 U.S.C. section 5802 rather than in the provisions before it, and quoted Haynes v. United States, 390 U.S. 85, 88 (1968), that "[s]eparate taxes are imposed on the making and transfer of [NFA] firearms by persons other than those obliged to pay the occupational taxes." It then found the connection too thin on the government's own figures: between 2016 and 2020, 87.5 per cent of silencers, 88 per cent of short-barrelled rifles, 97 per cent of any-other-weapons and 98.5 per cent of short-barrelled shotguns were made by qualified manufacturers already subject to the occupational tax, so the challenged provisions "might inform collection of the special occupational tax in only about 1 to 12% of cases," and of roughly 2.2 million National Firearms Act weapons transferred in 2025 the government pointed to 691 applications disapproved over occupational-tax issues, which the court worked out as 0.03 per cent. Setting the exchange out costs this page something in both directions, and both should be said: it shows the ruling was contested, and it also shows the court meeting the best answer against it, which makes the ruling look sturdier than a page that never mentioned the argument could have made it look.
Four limits belong with all of that and none of them is small. The relief is party-scoped, not universal. It reaches untaxed firearms only, so machineguns and destructive devices are untouched. It is a single district court. And the court stayed the effect of its own judgment "for seven days from the date of entry to allow the defendants to seek relief, if any, at the appellate level," which on an August 5, 2026 entry means the stay ran only to August 12, 2026. Whether a notice of appeal was filed, or the stay extended, could not be determined on August 11, 2026, when both dockets were checked again for this revision. The public RECAP mirror of the consolidated district-court docket, No. 6:25-CV-056-H, ends at the final judgment, Dkt. No. 137, entered August 5, 2026, with no later entry of any kind. The Jensen docket, No. 6:26-CV-227, was located this time where an earlier attempt had found nothing listed: it records the case as filed October 9, 2025 before Judge Hendrix and terminated June 8, 2026 on consolidation, with a last known filing of June 30, 2026, so it trails the lead docket rather than offering a second window on it. A search of the same archive's Fifth Circuit records returned no docket for this case. None of that establishes that no appeal was taken, and the temptation to read it that way runs in this page's favour: a mirror that shows nothing is not the same as a docket on which nothing happened, and the stay ran to August 12, 2026, a day beyond the last check. This page therefore treats the appellate status as unverified as of August 11, 2026 rather than reporting that no appeal was taken, and anyone reading this after August 12, 2026 should check the docket rather than rely on this paragraph. The section of this page built on the proposition that "a federal registry already exists" now rests on provisions that one federal court has held Congress had no power to enact, and this page states that as a district-court judgment entered August 5, 2026 whose own seven-day stay ran only to August 12, 2026 with the appellate position unverified, not as settled law.
THE DEALER RULE WAS VACATED. An earlier version of this page cited the rule defining who is "engaged in the business," 89 Fed. Reg. 28968 (April 19, 2024), as live law and as the anchor of a list of rulemakings. On June 12, 2026, in Texas v. ATF, No. 2:24-CV-089-Z, the Northern District of Texas entered final judgment holding that the plaintiffs had succeeded on the merits of their Administrative Procedure Act claims and that "The Final Rule is therefore VACATED." The court denied injunctive relief as redundant, dissolved its own 2024 preliminary injunction, and wrote that because vacatur under the Administrative Procedure Act is "not party-restricted," the defendants "may not apply the Final Rule to anyone." One further fact must travel with that, and it is not resolved: on July 10, 2026 the government moved under Rule 59(e) to amend the judgment so as to limit the vacatur to the aspects the court actually held unlawful, and the docket obtained for this revision shows an order setting a response deadline of July 24, 2026 but no ruling on that motion, and two docket entries missing from the public archive. So the rule is vacated on the face of a final judgment whose scope the government is actively contesting. This page says both halves.
THE AGENCY IS ALSO TRYING TO REPEAL IT, AND THAT DOCUMENT WAS MISSING FROM THIS PAGE. On May 6, 2026 ATF published a notice of proposed rulemaking, "Revising Regulations Defining 'Engaged in the Business' as a Dealer in Firearms," 91 Fed. Reg. 24424, proposing to remove the definitions and the rebuttable presumptions the 2024 rule added. It was published in the same issue as several rulemakings this page did list, and its omission was the more serious gap, because it is the one that undoes the rule the list was organised around.
THE DEFINITION OF AN UNLAWFUL USER WAS NARROWED IN JANUARY 2026, PROVISIONALLY. This is the change that most affects an ordinary reader of this page, and an earlier version stated a rule that the regulation had already contradicted. The instrument is 91 Fed. Reg. 2698, published and effective January 22, 2026, revising 27 C.F.R. section 478.11. Its status has to travel with it, because this page is careful about rule status everywhere else and was not here. Its own ACTION line reads "Interim final rule; request for comments." Comments closed June 30, 2026, and ATF states that it "will publish a final rule in the Federal Register adopting the IFR as final with any changes in response to public comments or adopting the IFR as final without change." The regulation is operative now and it is provisional. As revised, the definition provides that a person "who regularly uses a controlled substance over an extended period of time continuing into the present, without a lawful prescription or in a manner substantially different from that prescribed by a licensed physician, is an unlawful user of a controlled substance," and, in terms, that "A person is not an unlawful user of a controlled substance if the person has ceased regularly unlawfully using the substance, or if the person's unlawful use is isolated or sporadic or does not otherwise demonstrate a pattern of ongoing use." The consequence for the Form 4473 discussion further down this page is direct: the trap this page described is not a trap for an occasional user, because on the face of the current regulation an occasional user is not within the category and may answer truthfully. The passage has been rewritten to confine the problem to the person it actually reaches, which is the regular, ongoing user.
A TAX REPEALED, AND A REGISTRY LEFT STANDING
This belongs with the statutes rather than where an earlier version of this page put it, and the reason is given in the section that no longer carries it. The substance is a gap between what a change was widely understood to do and what the enacted text actually did.
In 2025 Congress zeroed the National Firearms Act transfer and making taxes for everything except machineguns and destructive devices. The district court in Silencer Shop described the change in those terms: "In 2025, Congress eliminated the NFA's transfer and making taxes for four categories of firearms: short-barreled shotguns, short-barreled rifles, silencers, and a final, defined group of miscellaneous firearms." A reader who stops there will conclude that the federal regime for those items was repealed.
It was not, though an earlier version of this page understated the amendment's reach in the course of saying so, and did it in a way that made the surviving registry look starker than the record supports. Pub. L. 119-21, section 70436 did not amend one subsection of one statute. It amended three provisions: section 5811(a), the transfer tax; section 5821(a), the making tax; and section 4182(a), a conforming excise provision. The court's phrase quoted just above, "transfer and making taxes," is accurate, and an earlier version of this page printed that quotation and then contradicted it two sentences later. The correction cuts against this page's own framing and is made for that reason. What the section did not do is the part this item turns on, and that part is unchanged. It did not touch 26 U.S.C. section 5841, which still directs the Secretary to maintain the central registry and still requires every maker, importer and transferee to be registered in it. It did not touch section 5845(a), which still defines which items are covered. It did not touch the requirement to obtain approval before making or transferring one. As of this drafting the registration, approval and recordkeeping machinery for a silencer is what it was in 2024, minus a two-hundred-dollar payment.
The agency behaved throughout as though the regime survived, and that is the best evidence available that it does. ATF spent May 2026 proposing to adjust that machinery by rule rather than reporting it repealed, including a proposal to remove chief-law-enforcement-officer notification, 91 Fed. Reg. 24471, and, in July, a proposal to revise fingerprint and photograph requirements for firearms applications, 91 Fed. Reg. 40924. Those proposals only make sense on the premise that the regime is still there to be adjusted.
So a person told that the National Firearms Act tax was repealed would not learn from the United States Code that he must still register the item with the federal government and obtain approval before making or transferring it. Nobody hid that, and this page does not suggest anyone did. Congress amended a tax rate in a tax act and said nothing about registration, which is exactly what the text does; no institution claimed the registry was abolished, and the shorthand did that on its own. The consequence was then drawn out in the open by a court rather than concealed, because the argument that removing the tax removed the constitutional footing for the registration provisions is precisely what the Silencer Shop plaintiffs made and won on at the district-court level.
WHAT IS GENUINELY CONTESTED
A great deal, and more of it than at any point since 2008.
WHETHER A NONVIOLENT FELONY MAY COST A PERSON THE RIGHT FOR LIFE. This is the deepest disagreement in Second Amendment law. The clearest statement of a middle position comes from the Sixth Circuit in United States v. Williams, No. 23-6115 (6th Cir. Aug. 23, 2024), which this revision read in the court's own opinion. Its holding: "we hold today that [section] 922(g)(1) is constitutional on its face and as applied to dangerous people." The principle it drew from history is the part that matters most: "when the legislature disarms on a class-wide basis, individuals must have a reasonable opportunity to prove that they don't fit the class-wide generalization." So the statute stands, and a person who can show he is not dangerous may still challenge its application to him.
That opinion also records what the landscape looked like before Bruen: "Every court of appeals to consider a facial challenge rejected it," citing Kanter v. Barr, 919 F.3d 437, 442 (7th Cir. 2019), while as-applied results were mixed and "Only one court of appeals sustained an as-applied challenge to [section] 922(g)(1)," citing Binderup v. Attorney General, 836 F.3d 336, 340, 356 (3d Cir. 2016) (en banc). The circuits have not converged since. An earlier draft of this page mapped the current alignment of every circuit from a single opinion's description of its own side of the split; that map was removed because this revision verified only one circuit's decision in its own text. A reader should treat the alignment as unsettled and should not take any list on this page as complete.
The Supreme Court has so far declined to resolve it. Hemani expressly declined to touch section 922(g)(1), and Justice Gorsuch's opinion said so in a sentence that also names felon disarmament as the road not taken. This page previously added that "The Court's own docket refuses automated retrieval, so this page names no pending petition and states no count of denials." That statement was false, it was repeated in four other places, and it was used to justify cutting material. The docket is publicly retrievable and was retrieved for this revision. What remains true is narrower and is stated as its own limitation: no systematic survey of pending petitions was performed here, so this page still names no count of denials, but the reason is that the work was not done rather than that the source refused.
WHERE THE ROUTE BACK WAS SUPPOSED TO BE. The Sixth Circuit put its finger on the same gap this page documents further down. Explaining why felons must resort to the courts when Congress had already written an administrative remedy, it wrote: "The answer is that Congress hasn't funded the program in decades." It drew the constitutional consequence itself, in a sentence this page had omitted: "without resort to the courts through as-applied challenges, the lack of an administrative scheme would abridge non-dangerous felons' Second Amendment rights." That is a federal appellate court describing a statutory right of application as inoperative, and treating the gap as constitutionally significant, in the middle of deciding whether the underlying prohibition is valid.
WHETHER AN ENTIRE CLASS OF COMMONLY OWNED RIFLES IS AN ARM. See the next section. This is now granted and undecided.
WHAT SURVIVES OF SECTION 922(g)(3) AFTER HEMANI. The Court affirmed a dismissal on one man's facts and reserved almost everything else, including whether a prosecution supported by individualised proof of dangerousness would stand. Whether a state-licensed cannabis user may lawfully own a shotgun is, after a unanimous judgment in one such man's favour and a narrowing of the implementing regulation in January 2026, clearer than it was and still not clearly answered.
WHETHER THE NATIONAL FIREARMS ACT SURVIVES ITS OWN TAX REPEAL. This question did not exist when this page was first published. One district court has now held that the registration and approval provisions cannot rest on the taxing power once the tax is zero, and no court of appeals has passed on it. It is the cleanest example on this page of a constitutional question created by an ordinary revenue amendment.
THE METHOD ITSELF. Bruen's test asks judges to weigh historical analogues, and Rahimi loosened it so that a regulation need not have a historical twin to be valid. Wolford shows how contested the application is: the majority found Hawaii's analogues too remote, one Justice wrote separately about part of the reasoning, and three Justices dissented in two opinions. An earlier version of this page said the disagreement ran "to historiography rather than to the standard." That is the opposite of what one of the two dissents says. Justice Kagan resolved the case on Rahimi's principles test and expressly declined to address either Bruen's first step or the historical materials. A test that turns on which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century statutes a court finds persuasive will produce different rights in different circuits for years, and it has, but Wolford is evidence that the disagreement is also about the standard itself.
THE COMMON-USE QUESTION IS NOW BEFORE THE COURT
On June 30, 2026 the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Viramontes v. Cook County, No. 25-238, and Grant v. Higgins, No. 25-566. An earlier version of this page described this grant at second hand and quoted nothing, on the stated ground that "The Supreme Court's own site refuses automated retrieval." That was false. The docket was retrieved directly for this revision and the order reads, in full: "Petition GRANTED. The petition for a writ of certiorari in No. 25-566 is granted as to the question presented by the petition in No. 25-238. The cases are consolidated, and a total of one hour is allotted for oral argument. VIDED."
The question presented, taken from the Court's own question-presented document for No. 25-238 rather than described: "Whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee the right to possess AR-15 platform and similar semiautomatic rifles."
The detail an earlier version of this page cut for want of verification is restored. Viramontes comes out of the Seventh Circuit, No. 24-1437, decided June 2, 2025, and concerns a Cook County ordinance. Grant comes out of the Second Circuit, No. 23-1344, decided August 22, 2025, reported at 153 F.4th 213, and concerns a Connecticut statute; the respondent is the Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection. Because the cases are consolidated, further filings appear on the docket of No. 25-238. The Court extended the time for the joint appendix and petitioners' merits brief to August 28, 2026 and for respondents' merits briefs to October 21, 2026, which means the case will not be argued before this page's next scheduled review.
Nothing about the grant predicts the outcome. What can be said with confidence is that until the Court rules, whether an entire class of commonly owned rifles is constitutionally protected depends on which State you are standing in, and that this has been true since Heller was decided in 2008.
WHETHER THE ANTI-CIRCUMVENTION PRINCIPLE REACHES THE SECOND AMENDMENT
This is the contested question this page cares most about, and it has to be stated carefully because the principle and its reach are two different propositions.
The principle is settled and it is not exotic. In National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175 (2024), a unanimous Supreme Court restated the rule of Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58 (1963). An earlier version of this page took its statement of that rule from the syllabus and rendered it as the page's own unquoted prose. The opinion of the Court puts it more strongly than the syllabus does, and the stronger form is very nearly this platform's own test, so it is quoted here and attributed: "Ultimately, Bantam Books stands for the principle that a government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly: A government official cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech on her behalf." 602 U.S. at 190. The Court closed with a sentence this page also previously presented unquoted, and which carries a qualification the earlier version silently dropped: "Ultimately, the critical takeaway is that the First Amendment prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech, directly or (as alleged here) through private intermediaries." 602 U.S. at 198. The words "as alleged here" are the Court's own reminder that Vullo came up on the pleadings, and dropping them made the sentence sound like a finding.
That is the government-by-proxy problem, recognised by all nine Justices, in a case about guns. What it is not is a Second Amendment holding. Vullo is a free-speech case about advocacy, and the Court decided it on the speech. Nothing in Vullo holds that the same analysis governs a State's use of banks, insurers, processors or dealers to burden the acquisition of arms rather than the advocacy of arms. Extending it there is an argument, and this page makes that argument in the section headed with our position. It does not pretend a court has accepted it.
The state-action cases run the other way on the easy version of the argument, and one of them was quoted here in a form that removed the very clause that helps us. Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, 587 U.S. 802, 814 (2019), holds "that the fact that the government licenses, contracts with, or grants a monopoly to a private entity does not convert the private entity into a state actor—unless the private entity is performing a traditional, exclusive public function." An earlier version of this page ended that quotation at the em-dash. The clause after the dash is the exception on which any argument like ours has to run, and cutting it made the case look like a flat bar when it is a rule with a stated carve-out. Rendell-Baker v. Kohn, 457 U.S. 830, 840-41 (1982), rejected state action for an institution drawing nearly all its income from government. And Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U.S. 991, 1004 (1982), frames attribution as act-specific: the question is whether the State is responsible for the specific conduct of which the plaintiff complains.
Those cases decide something narrow, and the narrowness is the point. A licence, a contract and a revenue stream, standing alone, do not make a private firm the state. They do not hold, and do not purport to hold, that a private party carrying out a government mandate at the government's direction stands outside the Constitution. On the other side sits Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives' Association, 489 U.S. 602 (1989), where the Fourth Amendment reached private railroad testing that the government had authorised and removed the legal barriers to, without compelling it, because the government had an interest in the results.
Lugar v. Edmondson Oil Co., 457 U.S. 922 (1982), is often cited on our side of this and is weaker for us than a casual reading suggests. Its test is conjunctive: the deprivation must result from a right or rule of conduct imposed by the State, and the party charged must be one who may fairly be said to be a state actor. It was applied to a private party jointly participating with state officials. It supports the proposition that attribution turns on conduct rather than on formal status. It does not, by itself, carry the argument this page makes, and an earlier draft framed it as though it did.
Wolford is the closest thing to a data point on our side, and it is not one. The structure the Court described, a State changing the background rule so that private parties decide whether a right may be exercised, resembles the argument this page makes. But the Court struck the rule as a burden on the right, not on any theory that the property owner had become an agent of the State. Note also what Hawaii actually did: it criminalised the permit holder's conduct directly and imposed no duty on the owner at all, so this is not even a clean case of the State acting through a private hand. Reading Wolford as vindicating the agency test would be overreading it, and we say so rather than claiming the win.
So the honest statement is this. Whether courts will currently find attribution on these facts is unsettled. The cases most often cited against us decide a narrower question than the one we pose, they contain an express exception we had cut out of the quotation, and Skinner runs our way on materially similar reasoning. Whether the anti-circumvention principle exists at all is not unsettled; the Supreme Court restated it unanimously in 2024, and did so in the language of doing indirectly what one may not do directly. Those are different questions and this page does not merge them.
A NOTE ON SOURCES, AND ON THREE EXCUSES THAT WERE NOT TRUE
A reader is entitled to know where these citations come from, and this page owes a correction here more than anywhere else on it.
Read in their own primary text for this revision: the slip opinions in Hemani and Wolford; the preliminary prints carrying the official pagination for Bruen, Rahimi, Vullo and VanDerStok; the bound volumes of the United States Reports for Bean, McDonald, Caetano and Halleck; the separate writings at the denial of certiorari in Snope v. Brown; the Supreme Court's dockets and question-presented documents in Nos. 25-238, 25-566 and 24-203; United States v. Williams in the Sixth Circuit's own opinion; 18 U.S.C. sections 922, 923, 925 and 926 and 26 U.S.C. sections 5811, 5841 and 5845 in the current Code; 27 C.F.R. sections 478.11 and 478.129 in the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations; the final judgments in Texas v. ATF and Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF and the memorandum opinion in the latter; the enrolled texts of Pub. L. 102-393, 112-55, 118-42, 119-4 and 119-74; Congressional Research Service In Focus IF12057; two separate FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System reports, the month-and-year totals and the year-by-state-and-type breakdown; and the Federal Register documents cited on this page. Not re-read here and carried on earlier verification: Heller, Cargill, and the general state-action authorities Rendell-Baker, Blum, Skinner and Lugar.
Now the correction. An earlier version of this page told readers, in five separate places, that the Supreme Court's own site "refuses automated retrieval," and told them once each that fbi.gov "refuses automated requests" and that Congressional Research Service products "returned an access refusal." All three statements were false, and each was doing work: each was the stated reason for cutting material out of this analysis. Every one of those sources was requested directly for this revision and returned the document. The material they were used to cut has been restored throughout this page. A false claim that a source is unavailable is worse than an ordinary citation error, because it cannot be checked by reading the page and it silently converts an unfinished search into an apparent property of the world.
What genuinely refuses automated retrieval, tested again for this revision and reproduced each time: atf.gov, gao.gov, cdc.gov and stacks.cdc.gov all return HTTP 403. Those remain honest gaps and the figures behind them are still absent from this page. One more deserves its own sentence because it is the subtlest failure mode on the internet: the Government Accountability Office report discussed further down, GAO-16-552, is served by govinfo.gov with an HTTP 200 status and an error page as the body. A status code said the document arrived; the document did not. The consequence is recorded in the section that relies on it.
THE REMEDY PROBLEM
Winning the constitutional argument and getting anything are not the same event, and on this issue the gap is wide enough to swallow the case.
Vullo is the first illustration. A unanimous Supreme Court agreed that the NRA had stated a First Amendment claim. What the NRA received was a remand: the judgment below, 49 F.4th 700, was vacated and the case sent back. The Court granted certiorari only on the First Amendment question and left the qualified immunity question for the Second Circuit to revisit on remand. This page does not state how that turned out, because the outcome was not verified for this revision. A principle was vindicated at the highest level available and the case went back down with the immunity question still open.
Hemani is the second illustration, from the opposite direction. Mr. Hemani won unanimously in the judgment and the statute he was charged under is untouched. An as-applied victory in a criminal case dismisses that indictment. It does not strike the provision, and the Court said in terms that it was not deciding whether a differently built prosecution under the same subsection would survive.
Bean is the third and the sharpest, because there the remedy failed without anyone reaching the merits at all. A statute gave a prohibited person a right to apply and a right to have a denial reviewed in federal court. Congress then defunded the agency's ability to decide. Because the agency could not act, there was no denial; because there was no denial, there was nothing for a court to review. A unanimous Court so held. Two rights on the face of one statute, and neither could be exercised.
One qualification on Bean belongs with it and an earlier version of this page left it out while using the case to say the courthouse was closed. Bean expressly reserved a different route. In footnote 2, at 537 U.S. 75, the Court wrote that "even assuming the Secretary has retained the authority to act on such petitions, it is not clear that respondent would prevail were he to file a requisite action under 5 U. S. C. section 706(1)," the Administrative Procedure Act provision authorising a court to "compel agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed." The Court doubted such a suit would succeed, because the Attorney General "possess[es] broad discretion as to whether to grant relief" and "congressional withholding of funds from ATF would likely inform his exercise of discretion." But doubting a route is not closing it. Bean holds that inaction is not a denial reviewable under section 925(c); it does not hold that no court may ever be asked to compel a decision. This page previously said the rider "closed both doors with one sentence." That overstates a case that is strong enough without it.
A word about who actually litigates, because it is easy to get backwards and an earlier draft of this page did get it backwards. Most of the landmark decisions on this page are civil pre-enforcement challenges brought by people who had not been prosecuted: Heller, McDonald, Bruen, Wolford, and the two cases now before the Court. The prohibited-person questions, by contrast, mostly arrive as criminal appeals: Rahimi, Hemani, Williams. The people in the weakest position are in neither group. They are the buyer quietly denied at the counter and the lawful firearms business whose bank closes its account. Neither has been prosecuted, neither has an obvious defendant, and that is precisely why this page has far less to say about them than about the two groups who do reach courts.
One structural obstacle recurs and a reader should know its name. Damages against an official run into qualified immunity, which asks not whether the right exists but whether it was clearly established when the official acted. A genuinely novel argument fails that test by definition, which means the first person to be right about a new constitutional claim ordinarily collects nothing for being right.
A DENIAL OF CERTIORARI IS NOT A RULING
In June 2025 the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to Maryland's assault-weapons ban, Snope v. Brown, No. 24-203. The denial was widely reported as though the Court had blessed the ban. It had not.
A denial of certiorari creates no precedent and decides nothing on the merits. It reflects the Court's judgment about timing, about whether a particular case is a good vehicle, and about whether the courts of appeals have finished disagreeing. Thirteen months later the Court granted certiorari on materially the same question in Viramontes and Grant. That sequence is the most useful thing a reader can take from this section, and the caution runs in both directions: the grant tells you the question will be answered, and nothing whatever about how.
An earlier version of this page removed the separate writings at that denial, on the false ground that the Court's site could not be retrieved. They are restored, because they are the best available evidence that a denial is not an endorsement, and they come from the Justices rather than from commentary. The docket entry for June 2, 2025 records, and this is the entry in full, including the two parenthetical markers an earlier version of this page silently dropped while calling the quotation complete: "Petition DENIED. Justice Alito and Justice Gorsuch would grant the petition for a writ of certiorari. Statement of Justice Kavanaugh respecting the denial of certiorari. (Detached Opinion ) Justice Thomas, dissenting from the denial of certiorari. (Detached Opinion )"
Justice Kavanaugh, respecting the denial, wrote that "Americans today possess an estimated 20 to 30 million AR-15s. And AR-15s are legal in 41 of the 50 States, meaning that the States such as Maryland that prohibit AR-15s are something of an outlier." He concluded that "petitioners have a strong argument that AR-15s are in 'common use' by law-abiding citizens and therefore are protected by the Second Amendment under Heller," that "under this Court's precedents, the Fourth Circuit's decision is questionable," and, on the point this section exists to make, that "a denial of certiorari does not mean that the Court agrees with a lower-court decision or that the issue is not worthy of review." He predicted the Court "should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon, in the next Term or two." It did, thirteen months later.
Justice Thomas, dissenting from the denial, described the Fourth Circuit's holding in Bianchi v. Brown, 111 F.4th 438, 448 (2024) (en banc), that AR-15s are not "arms" protected by the Second Amendment, and wrote: "I would grant certiorari to review this surprising conclusion." Note what these two writings do and do not establish. Four Justices are on record as troubled by the decision below, and none of that is a holding. A statement respecting a denial binds nobody, and Justice Kavanaugh's estimate of how many AR-15s exist is his, offered without a citation to a federal count. This page reports it as what a Justice wrote, not as a verified figure.
THE DECADE'S BIGGEST FEDERAL GUN RULINGS WERE NOT SECOND AMENDMENT RULINGS
Two of the most consequential recent Supreme Court decisions about firearms decided nothing at all about the right to keep and bear arms, and both are routinely described as though they did.
In Garland v. Cargill, 602 U.S. 406 (2024), the Court held that ATF exceeded its statutory authority in classifying a bump stock as a machinegun under the National Firearms Act, because a semiautomatic rifle so equipped does not fire more than one shot by a single function of the trigger. That is a question about what a 1934 tax statute says. Justice Thomas wrote for six Justices; Justice Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson. The Second Amendment appears nowhere in the holding.
In Bondi v. VanDerStok, 604 U.S. 458 (2025), the Court held that ATF's 2022 rule reading the Gun Control Act to cover certain weapon parts kits and unfinished frames or receivers is not facially inconsistent with the Act. Again a statutory question, again no constitutional holding. An earlier version of this page omitted the reporter citation on the stated ground that it could not be verified. It was verified for this revision from the Court's own preliminary print, which carries the official pagination, and it is given above.
The pattern is worth naming because it cuts both ways and misleads both sides. Cargill is filed away as a gun-rights victory and VanDerStok as a gun-control victory, and neither decided what anyone may constitutionally do. What they establish is that a great deal of federal firearms policy is made by agency interpretation of statutes written in 1934 and 1968, that such interpretation can be reversed by a new administration without Congress voting on anything, and that this machinery operates almost entirely below the constitutional question.
The current rulemaking record bears that out, and the pace of it is the point. In the space of three days in May 2026 ATF published thirty-five documents in the Federal Register: twenty-one on May 6 and fourteen on May 8, counted from the Federal Register's own index of that agency's 2026 publications. Among the proposals: to replace indefinite retention of firearms records with a fixed 20-year or 30-year term, 91 Fed. Reg. 24413 (May 6, 2026); to remove the stabilising-brace factoring criteria, 91 Fed. Reg. 24453 (May 6, 2026); to repeal the "engaged in the business" dealer definitions, 91 Fed. Reg. 24424 (May 6, 2026); to remove the requirement that a chief law enforcement officer be notified of National Firearms Act applications, 91 Fed. Reg. 24471 (May 6, 2026); to authorise licensees to generate, maintain and store records electronically, 91 Fed. Reg. 25210 (May 8, 2026); to revise Form 4473 itself, 91 Fed. Reg. 25432 (May 8, 2026); and to revise the definitions of "adjudicated as a mental defective" and "committed to a mental institution," which govern who is prohibited under section 922(g)(4), 91 Fed. Reg. 25166 (May 8, 2026). In the same period ATF issued final rules revising the machinegun definition in response to Cargill, 91 Fed. Reg. 24348, and changing National Firearms Act tax remittance, 91 Fed. Reg. 25112. Who is disarmed, who may sell a gun, what the form asks, how the record is kept and how long it lives all moved in a single week, by an agency, without a vote.
THE BAR ON A NATIONAL REGISTRY IS STATUTORY, AND THINNER THAN IT SOUNDS
The belief that federal law forbids a national gun registry is roughly true and importantly incomplete, and the incompleteness is entirely on the record.
WHERE THE FOUR-PROVISION FRAMEWORK IN THIS SECTION COMES FROM. An earlier version of this page presented this framework as its own and separately told readers that Congressional Research Service products "returned an access refusal" and that no CRS figure could therefore be used. Both halves were wrong, and the second concealed the source of the first. The framework is CRS's. In Focus IF12057, "Statutory Federal Gun Registry Prohibitions and ATF Record Retention Requirements," updated February 5, 2024, was retrieved directly for this revision and states it plainly: "Four provisions of statutory law prohibit a national registry of most, but not all, modern firearms. Two of these prohibitions set limits principally on ATF, while the other two set limits on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)." CRS is a nonpartisan official analyst of the record and counts as a primary source under this site's sourcing rule. It is credited here.
WHAT THE PROHIBITIONS ARE. First, 18 U.S.C. section 926(a) forbids any such rule or regulation prescribed after the Firearms Owners' Protection Act from requiring that records "be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States or any State or any political subdivision thereof," or that "any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established." Second, an appropriations proviso restricts what may be spent on consolidating dealer records, and its limiting words matter enough that an earlier version of this page should not have cut them. Quoted with them, from the enrolled act: "Provided, That no funds appropriated herein or hereafter shall be available for salaries or administrative expenses in connection with consolidating or centralizing, within the Department of Justice, the records, or any portion thereof, of acquisition and disposition of firearms maintained by Federal firearms licensees," Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2012, Pub. L. 112-55, 125 Stat. 552, 609. The earlier version dropped "for salaries or administrative expenses" without marking the elision, which turned a bar on two categories of spending into a bar on funds at large. That is the same class of defect this page corrects three times elsewhere, and it ran in this page's own favour. Third, Brady Act section 103(i) bars using the background-check system "to establish any system for the registration of firearms, firearm owners, or firearm transactions or dispositions, except with respect to persons, prohibited by section 922 (g) or (n) of title 18, United States Code or State law, from receiving a firearm." An earlier version of this page dropped the closing words "or State law," which widen the exception. Fourth, in CRS's account, a further appropriations general provision requires the FBI to destroy identifying information on a cleared purchaser within twenty-four hours, Pub. L. 112-55, 125 Stat. 632.
A DIFFERENCE WORTH FLAGGING RATHER THAN SMOOTHING OVER. An earlier version of this page gave 18 U.S.C. section 922(t)(2)(C), the statutory destruction requirement, as the fourth provision. CRS gives the twenty-four-hour appropriations rider instead. Both exist and both are real; they are not the same instrument, and this page had silently substituted one for the other while attributing the count to a source it said it could not read. Both are stated here, which makes five distinct provisions rather than four, and every one of them is a statute or an appropriations act.
THE SINGLE WORD, NOW SOURCED. This page previously asserted that the appropriations proviso became permanent "by force of a single word" and gave no source for it. The source is the same CRS product: for FY2012 "a word of futurity, 'hereafter,' was included in this proviso, which indicates it too is intended to apply permanently," citing H.Rept. 112-284 at 240; CRS records the same device in the twenty-four-hour destruction provision, citing the same report at 269.
Every one of these is a statute or an appropriations act. None is a constitutional holding. No court has held that the Second Amendment forbids a national firearms registry, and Congress can repeal any of these provisions by ordinary legislation.
WHAT ALREADY EXISTS, AND WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO IT. A federal registry is not hypothetical. 26 U.S.C. section 5841(a) directs that "The Secretary shall maintain a central registry of all firearms in the United States which are not in the possession or under the control of the United States." It covers National Firearms Act items, and section 5841 in its present form was added by the Gun Control Act of 1968, Pub. L. 90-618, title II, section 201, 82 Stat. 1229, replacing a similar provision that had stood since 1954 under a statute first enacted in 1934. As set out earlier on this page, most of what it holds became untaxed in 2025, and on August 5, 2026 a federal district court held that the registration provisions could no longer be sustained under the taxing power and permanently enjoined their enforcement as to untaxed firearms against the plaintiffs before it. That is one district court, party-scoped, and it is not the law of the country. The court stayed the effect of that judgment for seven days from entry, so the stay ran only to August 12, 2026; whether an appeal was filed or the stay extended could not be determined when both dockets were checked again on August 11, 2026, and a reader after that date should check the docket rather than rely on this sentence. It is nonetheless the first time a court has held that the only operating federal firearms registry exceeds Congress's enumerated powers, and a page that reported the registry's existence has to report that too.
WHAT AN AUDIT FOUND, AND WHY THIS PAGE CAN NO LONGER QUOTE IT. The Government Accountability Office examined ATF's compliance with the appropriations restriction in GAO-16-552 (June 30, 2016, publicly released August 1, 2016). An earlier version of this page first said the report could not be retrieved, then said that statement was false and quoted six passages from it. This revision has to correct the correction. gao.gov returns HTTP 403 to an automated request. The copy on govinfo.gov returns an HTTP 200 status with an error page as its body, which is the failure mode that produces confident quotation of a document nobody opened. The six quoted strings could not be verified for this revision and are therefore not reproduced here. They are not withdrawn as false; they are marked UNVERIFIABLE, which is a different and more honest thing. An earlier version of this passage also asserted that the report's title is itself a finding of non-compliance in part. That sentence has been removed. The title could not be obtained from any source this revision opened, and asserting something about a document in the same paragraph that says the document could not be opened is the defect this section exists to correct.
What can be said about that report is what an independent primary source says about it. CRS, in IF12057, records that GAO "audited ATF in 2016 to examine its compliance with the agency-related registry prohibitions" and that "While raising issues with some ATF systems, GAO found ATF's Out-of-Business Record Imaging System (OBRIS) in compliance with these prohibitions," adding that OBRIS "can be searched and its records retrieved manually by FFL number, firearm serial number, and other descriptors, but it was not electronically searchable by name or other personally identifying information." That is the finding most adverse to this page's argument, and it stands, corroborated by a source this page did read. The findings of partial non-compliance that an earlier version quoted are not repeated, because this revision could not open the document that contains them.
WHAT THE SCALE ACTUALLY IS, FROM A SOURCE THAT DID ANSWER. This page previously carried no figure of any kind about federal records holdings, and said that was because ATF, FBI and CRS all refused retrieval. CRS answered. IF12057 records that "A January 2022 ATF fact sheet indicated the bureau had collected 54.7 million firearms transaction records in 2021 from FFLs who had gone out of business," and that "Responding to a congressional inquiry, ATF later reported November 2021 holdings of nearly 921 million out-of-business records, 94% of which were computerized, as of November 2021." CRS then states, in its own voice rather than as any party's position, what those records are: "When ATF digitizes records, they are turned into images that cannot be detected using optical character recognition and can only be accessed for firearm tracing." An earlier version of this page introduced that sentence as ATF's position. It is not attributed to ATF in the product, and labelling it a party's claim quietly downgraded the fact most adverse to the argument this page makes. Both halves belong on the page. Nearly a billion federal records of firearms transactions, nine in ten of them digitised, is the scale of what the popular understanding of the registry ban does not describe. That they are non-searchable images accessed only for tracing is the reason it is not a registry in the sense section 926(a) uses. An analysis that argued the first point for a year without ever stating the number, while telling readers the number could not be obtained, was arguing with one hand behind its back for no reason.
This is not a claim that ATF operates an unlawful registry, and this page does not make one. What the texts establish on their own is enough for the point being made: the assurance that the federal government does not accumulate records of lawful firearms purchases is a set of policy choices recorded in statutes, in appropriations provisos, and in a regulation the agency is currently proposing to change. It is not a constitutional limit.
DISARMAMENT CAN HAPPEN BEFORE ANY HEARING
Rahimi upheld disarmament where a court had found that an individual poses a credible threat to the physical safety of another, and the disarmament it approved was temporary. Hemani, two years later, faulted the government's reading of section 922(g)(3) in part because it worked "without any pre-deprivation process."
Set that against how extreme risk protection orders, commonly called red flag laws, are actually built. An earlier version of this page said "Florida's statute is representative" and examined no other State. That sentence is withdrawn. It was an unsourced generalisation from a single example, and Florida is atypical on the one feature the argument turns on. Under Fla. Stat. section 790.401(1)(a), a "petitioner" means "a law enforcement officer or a law enforcement agency," and subsection (2)(a) confirms that only a law enforcement officer or agency may file. In many States a family or household member may petition. Whatever else follows from Florida's scheme, a reader cannot generalise from it to a class of statutes whose defining question is who gets to start the process, and this page does not claim to have surveyed the others. Florida is used below as one worked example, named as such.
In that example, under Fla. Stat. section 790.401(4), a petitioner may request a temporary ex parte risk protection order before a hearing and without notice to the respondent, and where the court finds "reasonable cause to believe" that the respondent poses a significant danger in the near future, the court "must issue" the order.
Three further features of the same statute answer much of the objection and belong here; an earlier version of this page gave two of them and omitted the third, which is the strongest. The court must set a hearing "no later than 14 days" after the order. A final order requires a finding "by clear and convincing evidence" and runs "up to and including but not exceeding 12 months." And the respondent has an affirmative right to move to vacate: the statute entitles the respondent to request one hearing to vacate after issuance, and another after every extension, with the hearing to be held between fourteen and thirty days after service. So the twin features Rahimi actually blessed, a judicial finding about a specific person and a temporary duration, are both present within a fortnight; the standard at the final hearing is higher than the ordinary civil standard; and there is a route out that does not depend on waiting for the order to expire.
There is a real argument on the other side of the objection as well, and it is not weak: ex parte temporary relief followed by a prompt adversarial hearing is the ordinary structure of protective orders throughout American law, and Rahimi upheld a firearms disability arising from a civil restraining order. Nothing here says these statutes are unconstitutional. No court has said so on this ground.
What remains worth a reader's attention is narrow, and narrower than it was. Between the ex parte order and the hearing there is a window in which an enumerated right is suspended on one party's showing at a reasonable-cause standard, and the two doctrinal signals the Supreme Court has given about process both point at process. On the motion to vacate, the burden is on the respondent to prove by clear and convincing evidence that he is not dangerous, which is the mirror image of the allocation the Sixth Circuit described as the relevant principle from our tradition. Whether any of that matters constitutionally is unresolved.
THE FORM ITSELF IS A TRAP FOR A REGULAR STATE-LICENSED USER
This one is small, concrete, and affects fewer people than an earlier version of this page implied, because a regulation changed in January 2026 and this page had not caught up.
Federal law disarms an "unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance," 18 U.S.C. section 922(g)(3), and lawfulness there is measured against federal law. Marijuana's federal status is the operative fact, and the record is more specific than the shorthand it is usually given. On April 28, 2026 the Drug Enforcement Administration issued a final rule moving Food and Drug Administration approved products containing marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, 91 Fed. Reg. 22714. That rule reaches approved pharmaceutical products. It does not reach the marijuana a state-licensed user buys.
The general proposal to reschedule marijuana itself, published May 21, 2024, remains pending and is moving. On the same day as that final rule, DEA withdrew its stalled 2024 notice of hearing, 91 Fed. Reg. 22778, and noticed a new hearing to commence June 29, 2026, stating that "In accordance with Executive Order 14370, DEA is completing this process in the most expeditious manner in accordance with Federal law," 91 Fed. Reg. 22777. An adversarial reviewer read the withdrawal as a reversal of the rescheduling effort; the two documents read together show the opposite, a procedural restart intended to speed it up. Either way, nothing in that record makes possession lawful under federal law today, and rescheduling to Schedule III would not by itself make possession without a prescription lawful.
Now the part this page had wrong. An earlier version said that a prospective buyer completing ATF Form 4473 faces a binary: answer yes to the unlawful-user question and be denied, or answer no and make a false statement on a federal form. That was true of any state-licensed user when it was written. It is not true now of an occasional one. As set out earlier on this page, ATF's interim final rule of January 22, 2026, 91 Fed. Reg. 2698, rewrote 27 C.F.R. section 478.11 so that a person "who regularly uses a controlled substance over an extended period of time continuing into the present, without a lawful prescription or in a manner substantially different from that prescribed by a licensed physician, is an unlawful user of a controlled substance," and so that "A person is not an unlawful user of a controlled substance if the person has ceased regularly unlawfully using the substance, or if the person's unlawful use is isolated or sporadic or does not otherwise demonstrate a pattern of ongoing use." A person whose use is occasional can now answer that question truthfully and lawfully. That instrument is an interim final rule, operative but provisional, and the narrowing this section relies on is provisional in the same way.
The trap is real for the person it still reaches, and it is worth stating precisely because the precision is what makes it a trap rather than a slogan. A person who uses marijuana under a state licence regularly and on an ongoing basis is an unlawful user on the face of the current regulation. If he answers yes he is denied. If he answers no he has made a false statement on a federal form. He is not a criminal in his own State and he has no way to comply with both governments at once. And the encounter is administered by a licensed private dealer, not a government officer, which is the structural point this page is built on. ATF proposed a revision of Form 4473 on May 8, 2026, 91 Fed. Reg. 25432.
Hemani is a genuine win for the person on the wrong end of that, and it is narrower than it reads. The Court affirmed the dismissal of one prosecution built on admitted every-other-day marijuana use, and reserved prosecutions supported by individualised proof of dangerousness, prosecutions of addicts, prosecutions of the presently intoxicated, and any future prophylactic statute Congress might write about a particular drug. The statute stands, the form still asks, and the answer is still recorded.
WHAT THIS SECTION IS, AND WHAT IT IS NOT
The items below compare something an institution said, or a promise a statute makes on its face, against what a primary document records. Each is built the same way: the statement, the record, the divergence, the innocent explanation stated honestly with whether the record rules it out, and a line recording whether a response was sought from the body named.
This section imputes no motive. It makes no claim about intent, plan or bad faith on the part of any official, agency, company or Congress. Where the only primary document available is one government body's account of another actor's conduct, that document establishes what the body stated, not the underlying fact, and the item says so.
One further limit specific to this issue. Several of the items below concern Congress rather than an agency or a company, and a legislature acting through appropriations riders and enacted text is not concealing anything: the riders are published, the statutes are published, and anyone may read them. What is documented here is a divergence between what a provision promises on its face and what the operative record does with it. That divergence is real and checkable. Calling it hidden would overstate it, and this page does not.
A note on balance, because an adversarial pass found this section one-sided, the finding was correct, and the attempt to answer it did not work. Every item here examines a regulator or a legislature acting to restrict, which means the section's method only ever runs in the direction of this platform's own editorial lens. A section that only checks one side is not applying a method, it is decorating a conclusion. A search was made for an item running the other way. It did not produce one that meets this section's own schema, and this page says so rather than padding the section to look even. The best candidate was the 2025 repeal of the National Firearms Act transfer and making taxes, which was widely read as a deregulation while the registration and approval machinery for the affected items survived untouched. That material is sound and it is on this page, in the statutes discussion above, under the heading A TAX REPEALED, AND A REGISTRY LEFT STANDING. It is not an item here because there is no documented statement for it to diverge from. The only statement available was a court accurately describing what the tax provision did, and the divergence had to be measured against what a reader, or the shorthand, would conclude, which is a divergence from nobody. An item whose own innocent-explanation paragraph concedes that no one claimed the thing is not an item. So the honest state of this section is that it still runs one way, that the search for a symmetric documented item was made and came back empty, and that the finding of one-sidedness stands unanswered.
A RESTORATION PROCESS DEFUNDED FOR INDIVIDUALS, NOT FOR COMPANIES
THE PROMISE ON THE FACE OF THE STATUTE. 18 U.S.C. section 925(c) tells a prohibited person that he may apply to the Attorney General for relief from federal firearms disabilities, that "the Attorney General may grant such relief if it is established to his satisfaction" that the applicant "will not be likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety" and that granting relief "would not be contrary to the public interest," and that a denial may be taken to a federal district court for review. The statute also requires that every grant be published: "Whenever the Attorney General grants relief to any person pursuant to this section he shall promptly publish in the Federal Register notice of such action, together with the reasons therefor." Read alone, that is a functioning administrative remedy with judicial oversight and a public record.
THE RECORD, PART ONE: THE MONEY, AND A CORRECTION ABOUT IT. Congress provided in 1992 that none of the funds appropriated shall be available to investigate or act upon applications for relief from federal firearms disabilities under section 925(c), Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government Appropriations Act, 1993, Pub. L. 102-393, 106 Stat. 1732. An earlier version of this page said "An identical rider has been enacted annually since," and that is wrong in a way that matters to this item's own conclusion. The riders are not identical, and the difference is the whole point of the item. The 1992 proviso reads, in full: "Provided further, That none of the funds appropriated herein shall be available to investigate or act upon applications for relief from Federal firearms disabilities under 18 U.S.C. 925(c)." It stops there. Later riders add a second proviso the original does not contain: "Provided further, That such funds shall be available to investigate and act upon applications filed by corporations for relief from Federal firearms disabilities under section 925(c) of title 18, United States Code." That clause appears in Pub. L. 112-55 at 125 Stat. 609, in Pub. L. 118-42 at 138 Stat. 139, and in the current act, Pub. L. 119-74, the Commerce, Justice, Science; Energy and Water Development; and Interior and Environment Appropriations Act, 2026, enacted January 23, 2026. All three enrolled acts were read for this revision. So the corporate carve-out is not an ATF interpretation of a uniform bar, as an earlier version of this page implied by quoting only ATF's notice for it. It is enacted text, and it is the text Congress has re-enacted while leaving individuals barred.
THE RECORD, PART ONE (CONTINUED): WHAT "ANNUALLY" MEANS NOW, AND A CORRECTION THAT OVERSHOT. The last revision of this page replaced "an identical rider has been enacted annually since" with a claim that the bar has been carried in every full-year Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations act from fiscal year 1994 through the current one. That is false, and the document quoted three sentences later refutes it. ATF was a bureau of the Treasury Department until the Homeland Security Act moved it into the Department of Justice, so for the first decade there was no Commerce-Justice-Science act for the rider to sit in. It sat in the Treasury appropriations acts, and Bean's footnote 3 lists them by number: nine enactments running from Pub. L. 103-123 for fiscal year 1994 through Pub. L. 107-67 for fiscal year 2002, all but one titled as Treasury, Postal Service and General Government or Treasury and General Government appropriations acts, the exception being the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2001. The claim was also unverifiable on the work actually done: five enrolled acts were read for this revision, not thirty, and a universal statement across three decades is not established by five.
What the record supports is this. The bar was first enacted for fiscal year 1993, in the Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government Appropriations Act, 1993, Pub. L. 102-393, 106 Stat. 1732. It travelled in the Treasury acts while ATF was a Treasury bureau, and the Supreme Court recorded the continuity itself, in a sentence footnoted to that list: "In each subsequent year, Congress has retained the bar on the use of appropriated funds to process applications filed by individuals." United States v. Bean, 537 U.S. 71, 75 n.3 (2002). Since ATF moved to the Department of Justice the bar has travelled in the Commerce-Justice-Science acts, and this revision opened four of them plus the original: Pub. L. 102-393, Pub. L. 112-55, Pub. L. 118-42, Pub. L. 119-74, and the fiscal year 2025 continuing resolution, Pub. L. 119-4. Bean carries the chain through fiscal year 2002 on the Court's own authority; the acts read here carry it at fiscal years 2012, 2024, 2025 and 2026. The years in between were not individually opened for this revision, and this page does not assert them.
Fiscal year 2025 is the interesting one, because it had no full-year Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations act at all. The rider operated that year by incorporation. The Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025, Pub. L. 119-4 (March 15, 2025), whose division A carries the separate short title Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2025, continued funding for "The Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2024 (division C of Public Law 118-42)" "under the authority and conditions provided in applicable appropriations Acts for fiscal year 2024." The phrase "925(c)" appears nowhere in that Act. An earlier version of this page gave the Act the short title of its own division A; the Act's short title is the longer one. Bean's footnote is also evidence that the individual-versus-corporate distinction is old and was visible to the Court.
THE RECORD, PART TWO: THE COURTS. The statute's judicial-review clause did not fill the gap, because it could not. In Bean a unanimous Court held that an actual decision by ATF on an application is a prerequisite to judicial review, and that "mere inaction by ATF does not invest a district court with independent jurisdiction to act on an application." 537 U.S. at 76. An earlier version of this page quoted that sentence without its last four words, which are in the opinion of the Court and absent from the syllabus; the syllabus is where the shorter version comes from, and the syllabus "constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court." The rider therefore shut the ordinary route in both directions: the agency could not decide, and without a decision there was nothing to review under section 925(c). As set out in the remedy section above, Bean reserved the question whether an action to compel agency action under 5 U.S.C. section 706(1) might lie, and doubted it would succeed. This page previously said the rider "closed both doors with one sentence" and omitted that reservation. The corrected statement is narrower and still damning.
THE RECORD, PART THREE: WHO WAS ACTUALLY SHUT OUT, AND FOR HOW LONG THIS PAGE CAN SAY SO. Corporate applicants could be heard in years when individuals could not. An earlier version of this page said they could be heard throughout the decades in which individuals could not, and nothing this page opened establishes that word. The 1992 proviso quoted above stops at section 925(c) and contains no corporate carve-out, so in fiscal year 1993 the bar applied to everyone. The carve-out appears in the enacted text of every later act read for this revision: Pub. L. 112-55 for fiscal year 2012, Pub. L. 118-42 for fiscal year 2024 and Pub. L. 119-74 for fiscal year 2026, with fiscal year 2025 taking the fiscal year 2024 conditions by incorporation. No act between fiscal years 1994 and 2011 was opened here, so this page does not say when the carve-out first appeared and does not claim the asymmetry ran for the whole period. ATF's own notice granting relief to a company asserts a start date: "since 1993 Congress has authorized ATF to expend appropriated funds to investigate and act upon applications filed by corporations for relief from Federal firearms disabilities," 84 Fed. Reg. 1491 (February 4, 2019), granting relief to Xisico USA, Inc. That is a party's characterisation of the appropriations history rather than the text of the fiscal year 1993 rider, and it is equally consistent with a carve-out that first appeared a year or more after the individual bar. Notices of the same kind appear at 77 Fed. Reg. 58150 (2012), 79 Fed. Reg. 73906 (2014) and 82 Fed. Reg. 39134 (2017). The enacted text quoted above is the authority for the practice, and this correction cuts against this item, because it removes the strongest available word for how long the asymmetry lasted.
THE DIVERGENCE. For more than three decades the United States Code told individual citizens that a route back existed, while the appropriations acts made it impossible for the only agency delegated the task to walk down it, and the Supreme Court held that the inaction the rider produced was not itself reviewable under the statute. The rider does not amend section 925(c) and does not appear in it. A person reading the statute would have no way of knowing that the remedy was inoperative for him, and no way of knowing that a corporation in the same position could apply and be granted relief under a clause of the same proviso that barred him.
WHAT CHANGED, AND HOW MUCH. In March 2025 the Department withdrew ATF's delegation and returned relief determinations to the Attorney General, on the reasoning that the rider binds ATF's appropriation rather than the Department at large, 90 Fed. Reg. 13080. A proposed rule to implement section 925(c) followed, 90 Fed. Reg. 34394 (July 22, 2025). Grants to individuals have appeared in the Federal Register as the statute requires: ten people, relief granted March 31, 2025, published at 90 Fed. Reg. 17835 (April 29, 2025); a further notice at 91 Fed. Reg. 8532 (February 23, 2026), whose contents were not read for this revision and whose count is therefore not stated; and four people, relief granted March 30, 2026, published at 91 Fed. Reg. 32094 (May 29, 2026). An earlier draft of this page gave the grant dates as though they were the publication dates. All three were wrong, and are corrected here.
TWO THINGS IN THOSE NOTICES A READER SHOULD SEE. The first is that the ten names published in April 2025 include Mel Gibson. This page makes no claim of any kind about him or about the merits of his application, and it does not suggest he received anything he was not entitled to; his name is in the Federal Register because section 925(c) commands that every grant be published, which is the same statutory transparency this item is praising two paragraphs below. It is named because a section whose stated method is to measure statements against the record forfeits the method if it reads a document, counts the names in it, and omits the one name a reader would recognise. The second is what both notices say about where the applications came from. The May 2026 notice records that "the former Attorney General" granted the relief on a review of materials individuals had submitted "seeking either a pardon or relief from Federal firearms disabilities," 91 Fed. Reg. 32094. An earlier version of this page treated that formula as a change the second notice introduced. It is not a change. The April 2025 notice uses it identically, describing a review of "the materials that each individual submitted seeking either a pardon or relief from federal firearms disabilities," 90 Fed. Reg. 17835, and both notices were opened for this revision so that the two could be compared rather than characterised. What is true of both, and was true from the first grant, is that this is discretionary executive review drawing partly on the clemency pipeline, which is a materially different thing from the statutory application process with judicial review that section 925(c) describes on its face. The only difference between the two notices on this point is the tense, because by May 2026 the Attorney General who granted the relief had left office.
WHAT WOULD EXPLAIN IT INNOCENTLY. Congress is entitled to fund and defund whatever it likes, and every rider is published in the Statutes at Large. There is no evidence in the record obtained that anyone concealed anything, and this page alleges no concealment. There was also always another statutory route the rider never touched: 18 U.S.C. section 921(a)(20) excepts certain convictions, including those expunged, set aside or pardoned, and those for which civil rights have been restored, from section 922(g)(1)'s predicate, and the Sixth Circuit pointed to it in 2024 as a possible solution alongside section 925(c). An earlier draft of this page omitted that, and left a reader to conclude there had been no route back at all.
WHAT THE RECORD ESTABLISHES, AFTER ALL OF THOSE QUALIFICATIONS. A statutory right of application carrying judicial review on its face was unusable by individuals for three decades while remaining printed in the Code; a clause of the same appropriations proviso kept it usable by corporations in every year this page verified, though the original 1992 rider carried no such clause and this page did not open the years between; and the Supreme Court confirmed that the courts could not step in under the statute. A citizen relying on the Code alone would have been misled by it.
WHAT IT ALSO ESTABLISHES, AND CUTS THE OTHER WAY. The relief that exists is public in a way the disability is not. A person's prohibited status appears in no public list. A person whose rights are restored is named in the Federal Register, permanently, with the date, because the statute says so. That asymmetry is a design choice, it is in the statute, and it is worth noticing.
A REGULATOR'S RISK GUIDANCE, AND WHAT THE SUPREME COURT MADE OF IT
STATED. In April 2018 the Superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services issued guidance letters to regulated insurers and banks on risk management relating to the NRA and similar gun promotion organizations. As the Supreme Court's opinion in National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175 (2024), records them, the letters encouraged regulated entities to evaluate and manage the risks, including reputational risks, arising from dealings with such organizations, to review any relationships they had with them, and to take prompt action to manage those risks. On their face these are prudential risk-management advisories.
THE RECORD. The same opinion records that the Superintendent and the Governor issued a joint press release urging insurance companies and banks doing business in New York to join those that had already discontinued their arrangements with the NRA. It records that the Department entered separate consent decrees with three insurers in which they agreed not to provide NRA-endorsed insurance programs, even lawful ones, and to pay multimillion-dollar fines. And it recites the allegation, taken as true at the pleading stage, that the Superintendent offered one insurer a deal under which it would scale back NRA-related business and, in exchange, the Department would focus a forthcoming enforcement action only on syndicates serving the NRA.
THE DIVERGENCE. Guidance framed as risk management sat alongside a public call to cut ties and, on the allegations, a private offer of enforcement leniency in return for compliance. A unanimous Supreme Court held that the complaint stated a First Amendment claim, and wrote that "the critical takeaway is that the First Amendment prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech, directly or (as alleged here) through private intermediaries."
WHAT THE RECORD DOES AND DOES NOT SETTLE. This item must be read with a hard limit attached. Vullo reached the Court on a motion to dismiss. The Court took the complaint's allegations as true and decided only that they state a claim; it made no finding that any of them occurred. It vacated the judgment below, 49 F.4th 700, and remanded, leaving the court of appeals free to revisit qualified immunity. The consent decrees and the published letters are documents rather than allegations. The private exchange is an allegation. This page does not treat it as a finding. The opinion was read directly for this revision, in the preliminary print carrying the official pagination, which is why the quotation above now carries the Court's own parenthetical "as alleged here" rather than dropping it, and why the quotations in this item now carry page numbers. An earlier version of this item quoted the case repeatedly with no pin cite at all while the contested section above pin-cited the same opinion twice, which left the reader of the harsher section with no way to check it.
WHAT WOULD EXPLAIN IT INNOCENTLY. A great deal, and more than for any other item in this section. This paragraph is required by the method stated at the top of this section, every other item here has one, and this item did not until this revision. That is worth recording plainly, because this is both the only item that turns on a named individual and the item where the innocent explanation does the most work against the argument this page is making. The Superintendent is the prudential regulator of New York's insurers and banks, and reputational and compliance risk is an ordinary supervisory subject rather than a pretext invented for this occasion. The investigation began on a tip passed along from a gun-control advocacy group, which a reader may reasonably think cuts against the regulator, and it then found real violations: on the Court's own account it "revealed at least two kinds of violations of New York law: that Carry Guard insured intentional criminal acts, and the NRA promoted Carry Guard without an insurance producer license." 602 U.S. at 182. Those violations were not disputed into nothing afterwards. The consent decrees "stipulated that Carry Guard violated New York insurance law," listed further infractions of that law, and both Lockton and Chubb "admitted liability." 602 U.S. at 185. And the Court said in terms that pursuing all of it was open to her: "Vullo was free to criticize the NRA and pursue the conceded violations of New York insurance law." 602 U.S. at 187.
DOES THE RECORD RULE THAT EXPLANATION OUT. No, and it does not attempt to. What the Court held is narrower and sits alongside it: that a regulator entitled to pursue genuine violations may not also "wield her power, however, to threaten enforcement actions against DFS-regulated entities in order to punish or suppress the NRA's gun-promotion advocacy," 602 U.S. at 187, and that the complaint plausibly alleges she did that as well. A lawful enforcement basis and an unlawful purpose are not alternatives; they can both be present, and at the pleading stage no court has found which was operating. On its own facts this is therefore the weakest item in this section, and a reader should treat it as the least established rather than the most damning. It is kept for the reason given below, which is structural.
The reason it appears here at all is structural rather than personal. The mechanism the complaint describes, leaning on regulated intermediaries rather than regulating the disfavoured party directly, is the mechanism this whole analysis is about, and it is the one a unanimous Court identified by name.
NO REGISTRY, AND A RECORD KEPT UNTIL THE DOORS CLOSE
THE PROMISE ON THE FACE OF THE STATUTE. An earlier version of this item opened by saying that the federal registry prohibition is repeatedly described, by its supporters and by the agency, as a guarantee that the government does not compile records of firearms transactions. That sentence named no speaker, quoted nothing and cited nothing, and it has been removed. This item rests instead on the other limb of this section's method, a promise a statute makes on its face. 18 U.S.C. section 926(a) forbids a rule or regulation from requiring that records be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed or controlled by the United States or any State or any political subdivision, or that "any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established." That text is the promise, and what follows measures it against the operative record rather than against anybody's characterisation of it.
THE RECORD. What a regulation may not require, a statute requires in one specific circumstance. 27 C.F.R. section 478.129(b) currently requires that "Licensees shall retain each Form 4473 until business or licensed activity is discontinued." And 18 U.S.C. section 923(g)(4) provides that "Where discontinuance of the business is absolute, such records shall be delivered within thirty days after the business discontinuance to the Attorney General." The scale of what that produces is not hypothetical and is now on this page: ATF reported to a congressional inquiry holdings of nearly 921 million out-of-business records as of November 2021, 94 per cent of them computerised.
THE DIVERGENCE, STATED WITH ITS QUALIFICATIONS. Every transaction record a dealer creates is retained for the life of the business and, if that business simply closes, ends up in federal hands. But the statute has three destinations, not one, and an earlier draft of this page reported only the middle one. Where the business is succeeded by a new licensee the records go "to the successor." Where state law or local ordinance requires it, the Attorney General may arrange delivery to another responsible authority instead. The retention period is not fixed law: it was set by rule in 2022 and ATF proposed on May 6, 2026 to replace it with a term of twenty or thirty years, 91 Fed. Reg. 24413. And the records ATF holds are, on the account CRS gives of them, non-searchable images accessible only for tracing, which is the fact most directly adverse to reading this item as a hidden registry and is stated here for that reason. This is not a registry in the sense section 926(a) uses, and no claim is made here that it is one. What remains true is narrower: the popular understanding of the guarantee, that the federal government does not end up holding the record of your purchase, is not what the provisions say when read together, and the number is nearly a billion.
WHAT WOULD EXPLAIN IT INNOCENTLY. All of it. The delivery requirement is the mechanism by which a firearm can still be traced after a dealer closes, which is the entire point of a decentralised recordkeeping system, and it has been in the Gun Control Act since 1968. The retention rule was made by ordinary published rulemaking in 2022, replacing a twenty-year rule, and is being changed by ordinary published rulemaking now. Nothing here is concealed and nothing here is unlawful. The item is included because the gap between what the guarantee is understood to mean and what the texts provide is large, checkable, and load-bearing for the argument in the position section below.
WHAT THIS SECTION DOES NOT ESTABLISH
It does not establish that ATF maintains an unlawful registry. It does not establish that any official concealed the section 925(c) rider. It does not establish that Superintendent Vullo did what the NRA alleged; the Supreme Court decided a pleading question and made no findings. It makes no claim about Mel Gibson or about any individual named in a Federal Register grant notice. It establishes no motive for anyone.
Several things this analysis wanted to check still could not be checked, and the list is much shorter than it was because most of the previous list was wrong. Federal firearms commerce, trace and National Firearms Act registration data published by ATF could not be retrieved: atf.gov returns HTTP 403 to an automated request, tested again for this revision. Injury and mortality data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could not be retrieved: cdc.gov and stacks.cdc.gov both return HTTP 403. GAO-16-552 could not be retrieved: gao.gov returns HTTP 403 and the govinfo copy returns an HTTP 200 status with an error page as the body, so its quoted findings are marked UNVERIFIABLE above rather than repeated.
What was previously listed as refusing, and answered when this revision asked: the Supreme Court's site, fbi.gov and the Congressional Research Service. All three answered on first request when they were tested on August 11, 2026, and that is the whole of what this page knows about them. An earlier version of this sentence said those hosts do not refuse, which states a standing property of the world on the strength of one successful fetch and is the same error in reverse as the one this section exists to correct. Availability is a property of a moment. This page's Congressional Research Service material is quoted from the copy of In Focus IF12057 retrieved that day, and a later reader should re-test rather than rely on this sentence. The FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System month-and-year report was retrieved directly and is current through July 31, 2026. It records a program-to-date total of 542,566,215 background checks since 1998, and annual totals of 39,695,315 for 2020, 38,876,673 for 2021, 31,596,646 for 2022, 29,854,176 for 2023, 28,097,205 for 2024, 26,123,215 for 2025, and 15,318,919 for the first seven months of 2026. The FBI's own note travels with those figures and this page prints it rather than paraphrasing it: "These statistics represent the number of firearm background checks initiated through the NICS. They do not represent the number of firearms sold. Based on varying state laws and purchase scenarios, a one-to-one correlation cannot be made between a firearm background check and a firearm sale." A second FBI report shows why that note has to be taken seriously, and it defeats what an earlier version of this page did with these figures. The Bureau also publishes a year-by-state-and-type breakdown, which was opened and read directly for this revision. Two of the types it counts are Permit and Permit Recheck: checks initiated by state agencies against permit holders, not checks run by a dealer on a buyer standing at a counter with a Form 4473. For calendar year 2023 that breakdown records 7,594,227 Permit checks and 5,289,857 Permit Recheck checks against a grand total of 28,732,139. That is 12,884,084 checks, 44.8 per cent of the year, that are not dealer transfers at all. Two States account for most of it: Kentucky's 2023 total of 3,685,843 is 3,391,543 Permit Recheck checks, and Illinois's total of 3,961,236 is 3,502,639 Permit checks. The two FBI reports also do not agree on the year, and this page states both rather than choosing: the month-and-year report gives 29,854,176 for 2023, the type breakdown gives 28,732,139.
An earlier version of this page called the program-to-date total the closest available measure of how often the mechanism this page is about actually operates, and said in the position section that every one of those checks was run by a private party on a citizen, at federal command, on a federal form. Neither statement survives that breakdown, and the second inflated this page's own central argument with a number that does not measure it. Both have been removed. What the FBI's own data supports is narrower and is stated that way here and below: the Bureau publishes a type breakdown in which permit and permit-recheck checks are roughly forty-five per cent of the total, so the headline totals are an upper bound on dealer-counter transactions rather than a count of them.
An earlier version of this page said that no figure from any unretrieved source appears anywhere on it, and presented that as rigour. It was rigour applied to a false premise. Three of the four sources it declared unavailable were available, and the figures above were obtainable at any point.
STUMPWATCH'S POSITION: THE GOVERNMENT MAY NOT HIRE OUT WHAT IT MAY NOT DO
This is our position. It is not a description of what courts have held and we do not present it as one. It does not change if a court rules against it, because it is a claim about what the Constitution is for rather than a prediction about litigation.
A civilian company or individual acting on behalf of the government is a government agent, directly or by proxy. Constitutional protections against the government extend to its authorized agents by whatever method is used to obscure the government's control. The test we apply, on this issue and every other:
Would this be a constitutional violation if a government official did it directly? If it would, then it is the same violation when an authorized agent of the government does it instead.
Applied to guns, the test asks a question the litigation mostly does not. Not whether this company is a state actor, which is the wrong question and one the case law answers narrowly, but: whose programme is this, and would the government be permitted to run it in its own name?
The principle is not invented for this page, and this revision found that the Supreme Court has stated it in almost the words we use, in a case about guns, which an earlier version of this page had quoted only from the syllabus in a weaker form. The opinion of the Court in Vullo says: "Bantam Books stands for the principle that a government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly." That is our test, in the Court's mouth, limited by the Court to the First Amendment. The limitation is real and we do not paper over it. But the sentence is not a stray formulation; it is how the Court itself described the rule it was applying, and an analysis arguing for functional equivalence should have been quoting it from the start. Skinner reached private railroad testing the government had authorised without compelling. Lugar asks whether conduct is fairly attributable to the State, though on a two-part test that we do not claim is satisfied automatically. And Halleck, which is usually cited against us, states the bar with an exception attached: licensing, contracting and monopoly do not convert a private entity into a state actor "unless the private entity is performing a traditional, exclusive public function." Whether federally mandated firearms screening is such a function is a hard question. It is a question, which is more than an earlier version of this page conceded when it quoted the sentence without its exception.
Take any other right and the point is obvious. The government cannot pay a contractor to search your house without a warrant, or hire a private firm to seize a newspaper's presses, and then answer the claim by saying a private party did it. Nobody would accept that answer. It should not become acceptable because the subject is a rifle and the private party is a licensed dealer or a bank.
We state the strongest response to this squarely, because it is a good one. Heller's own dicta treat conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms as presumptively lawful, and dealer licensing and recordkeeping are the paradigm case of such a condition. A version of our argument that made every regulated business obeying a recordkeeping mandate into a constitutional actor would swallow ordinary commercial regulation whole, and that version is wrong. Our position is narrower and it turns on function: the question is whether the private party is performing the government's programme, on the government's direction, to produce a result the government wanted and could not lawfully produce itself.
THE DEPUTISED DEALER
Apply the test to the part of the system nobody argues about.
A federally licensed dealer is not merely a regulated merchant. He is required by federal law to run a government background check on a prospective buyer before a transfer, 18 U.S.C. section 922(t); to create a federal form recording the buyer's identity and the firearm, and to keep it for as long as he is in business, 27 C.F.R. section 478.129(b); to open those records to inspection on a warrant, and also without a warrant and without reasonable cause in the circumstances set out in 18 U.S.C. section 923(g)(1)(B); to answer the government's trace requests; and, when he closes his doors for good, to deliver the archive to the Attorney General within thirty days, 18 U.S.C. section 923(g)(4). He performs each of those functions for the government, at the government's direction, on pain of losing his licence. He is not selling the government a product. He is executing a federal screening and record-creation programme on premises he happens to own.
The scale of that programme is now on this page rather than asserted without a number, and the number has to be stated with the limit the FBI's own data puts on it. More than 542 million background checks have been initiated through the system since 1998, and more than 26 million in 2025 alone. An earlier version of this paragraph added that every one of them was run by a private party on a citizen, at federal command, on a federal form. That was wrong, and it was wrong in the direction that flattered this page's own argument. The FBI's year-by-state-and-type breakdown, set out earlier, shows that permit and permit-recheck checks initiated by state agencies were roughly forty-five per cent of the 2023 total. Those are not dealer transfers and no Form 4473 is involved. What the totals establish is an upper bound, not a count: the number of dealer-counter transactions of the kind this section is about is smaller than the headline figure, and this page does not know it.
Now run the test. Could the government require a citizen, as a condition of exercising an enumerated right, to identify himself on a federal form that is retained for as long as the dealer stays in business, is open to warrantless inspection without any showing of cause, and is eventually delivered into federal hands? That question has never been answered, because it has never been asked in that shape: the record is created by a private party, so no one is compelled by the government and nothing is seized. Structuring it that way does not make the record less governmental. It makes the constitutional question easy to avoid, which is precisely why it should not be allowed to be.
One correction inside our own argument, because it ran our way and was still wrong. An earlier version of this page said those records are open to warrantless inspection "at least annually," and described an "annual compliance inspection" as one of the dealer's obligations. The statute says the opposite about that route: warrantless compliance inspections may occur "not more than once during any 12-month period." We overstated the government's routine access and we withdraw it. The accurate version is not weaker, and we would rather have it, but it has to be counted correctly, because our first correction miscounted it the other way. There are three routes in section 923(g)(1)(B), not four. The twelve-month cap applies only to the compliance route in subparagraph (ii), and that same route carries its own uncapped exception: under subclause (II), records relating to a firearm involved in a criminal investigation traced to the licensee may be inspected "at any time." The two criminal-investigation routes, in subparagraphs (i) and (iii), carry no numerical limit at all. So the ceiling sits on the most benign of the three doors, and it does not close even that one.
We are careful about what follows from this, because the honest answer is: less than one might want. Background checks are not obviously unconstitutional and we do not argue that they are. Heller's dicta cut against us. No court has held that dealer recordkeeping implicates the Second Amendment at all. And two facts on this page cut against the strongest version of the argument and are stated rather than buried: the background-check system is required by statute to destroy its records of a cleared purchase, 18 U.S.C. section 922(t)(2)(C), and the federal archive of out-of-business records consists, on the account CRS gives, of non-searchable images accessible only for tracing. What we argue is narrower and, we think, unavoidable once stated.
First, the constitutional analysis should follow the function rather than the ownership of the filing cabinet. If a government-mandated record about the exercise of a constitutional right would raise a question when the government created it, the question does not disappear because a licensee created it under compulsion.
Second, the protections that currently apply to that record are statutory, revocable, and thinner than the public believes. That is a description, not a stance: section 926(a) constrains regulations, the consolidation bar lives in an appropriations act, the destruction requirement is a subsection of a statute Congress can amend, the twenty-four-hour destruction rule for cleared checks is another appropriations provision, and the retention rule is being changed right now by ordinary rulemaking. A protection that Congress can withdraw in a spending bill is a policy, not a right. This page can now put a date on how fast that machinery moves: in three days in May 2026 an agency proposed to change who counts as a dealer, who counts as mentally prohibited, what the form asks, how the record is stored and how long it is kept.
Third, where a State conscripts a private party to impose a restriction the State could not impose directly, the restriction should be measured as the State's. Hawaii's flipped default is the nearest example and the Supreme Court held against it in June 2026, though on burden rather than attribution, and although Hawaii in fact regulated the permit holder directly rather than the owner. The same structure recurs elsewhere: pressure on banks, insurers and processors to decline a lawful business; conditions on landlords; conditions on employers. When the government's hand is on the lever, the fact that a private hand is on the switch should not end the inquiry.
THE FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARY IS THE CLEANEST CASE, AND THE LEAST LITIGATED
The dealer is the most structural example of the argument and the property owner is the most recent. The financial intermediary is the one where the mechanism is plainest and the law is emptiest, and it deserves its own paragraph rather than a clause.
A firearms retailer needs a bank account, a payment processor and, if it sells insurance-adjacent products, an insurer. None of those is a constitutional actor on any current doctrine. Each is licensed and supervised by a government that can make its life difficult. The Vullo record shows what that combination permits: guidance letters about reputational risk, a public call by the regulator and the Governor for institutions to cut ties, consent decrees in which insurers agreed to stop offering lawful products, and an alleged private offer of enforcement leniency in exchange for compliance. A unanimous Supreme Court held that this stated a First Amendment claim, and described the governing principle as a bar on doing indirectly what one may not do directly.
Our argument is that the same conduct should be assessed the same way when the burden falls on acquiring arms rather than on advocating for them. If a superintendent may not lean on insurers to punish gun advocacy, an official should not be able to lean on banks or processors to make lawful firearms commerce impossible either.
We state the weakness of this plainly. Vullo is a speech case, and speech doctrine has a coercion rule with a long lineage that Second Amendment doctrine does not. There is no decided case extending it. The Court's most quotable sentence for us also carries its own limit: the parenthetical "as alleged here" is a reminder that even in Vullo nothing was found to have happened. The person injured, a business quietly de-banked, is also the person least able to litigate: there is no prosecution to defend, often no written government demand to point at, and the bank has every incentive to say the decision was its own. That is a description of why the law here is thin, not evidence that the conduct does not occur, and this page does not claim more than the Vullo record supports.
We should also be honest about a gap in this section that is ours and not the law's. We have no measure of how often it happens. There is no federal count of de-banked firearms businesses, and the two federal sources that publish adjacent data, ATF and the Federal Reserve, were not usable here: ATF refuses automated retrieval and no Federal Reserve series was identified that isolates this. So this section rests on one litigated record and on structural reasoning, and it should be read as the thinnest part of the analysis rather than the strongest.
DISARMAMENT SHOULD REST ON A FINDING ABOUT A PERSON, NOT A STATUS
The federal prohibited-person system is built on categories. A conviction for any offence punishable by more than a year, whenever it occurred and whatever it was, disarms a person for life under 18 U.S.C. section 922(g)(1). Unlawful drug use disarms automatically and, on the government's own reading in Hemani, from "the moment he becomes an unlawful user and until he ends his drug use—all without any pre-deprivation process." An adjudication or commitment for mental illness disarms without regard to when it happened or whether the person is dangerous now, and the definitions that decide who falls in that category were put out for revision by rule in May 2026.
Our position is that a categorical, permanent, status-based deprivation of an enumerated right is the wrong instrument, and that the Constitution should require a finding about the person in front of the court. We say this as a position and we note where it has support and where it does not.
It has support in the shape of what courts have actually approved. Rahimi upheld disarmament where a court had found that an individual poses a credible threat to the physical safety of another, and the disarmament it approved was temporary. Rahimi also rejected the government's attempt to defend disarmament on the ground that the defendant was not "responsible," holding that "'Responsible' is a vague term" that does not "derive from our case law" — which is the Supreme Court declining, in terms, to let a status adjective do the work of a finding. Hemani faulted the government's reading of section 922(g)(3) for imposing an automatic deprivation without process. And the Sixth Circuit has already adopted a version of the individualised principle, holding that "when the legislature disarms on a class-wide basis, individuals must have a reasonable opportunity to prove that they don't fit the class-wide generalization," and adding that "without resort to the courts through as-applied challenges, the lack of an administrative scheme would abridge non-dangerous felons' Second Amendment rights." That is not our whole position, but it is a federal appellate court reaching part of it and drawing a constitutional consequence from the defunding described elsewhere on this page.
It lacks support in that no court has adopted the general proposition, Heller's dicta about longstanding prohibitions on possession by felons and the mentally ill cut directly against it, the Sixth Circuit upheld section 922(g)(1) both facially and as applied to dangerous people in the same opinion that helps us, and the Supreme Court left section 922(g)(1) untouched in Hemani and said so expressly.
There is a second commitment here that has nothing to do with the Second Amendment and everything to do with due process, and it applies whichever way one reads the right. A deprivation that is permanent should have a route out that functions. Section 925(c) promised one; appropriations riders defunded it for individuals for three decades while a clause of the same proviso kept it open for corporations; and Bean held that the resulting inaction could not be taken to a court under the statute, while reserving whether an action to compel agency action might lie. Whether one thinks the categories are too broad or exactly right, a system that disarms for life, defunds the only administrative mechanism for review for natural persons but not for companies, and then offers no statutory route to a court because there is no decision to appeal is not defensible on anyone's theory of the Constitution.
We also state where our own commitments collide, because pretending they do not would be dishonest. StumpWatch's lens favours rights and civil liberties. On this issue that means favouring both the person who wants to keep a rifle and the person the state wants to disarm without a hearing, and it does not offer a rule for the case where arming one person endangers another. We do not have that rule. What we have is a starting position: where the question is genuinely close, the benefit of the doubt goes to the individual and against the government, and the government carries the burden of justifying what it takes.
WHERE WE BELIEVE THE LAW SHOULD GO
None of what follows is law. Each item is an argument, and each is stated so a reader can disagree with it precisely.
THE FUNCTIONAL TEST SHOULD GOVERN. Where a private party performs a government programme at the government's direction, courts should ask whether the government could constitutionally perform the act itself, and treat the answer as controlling. Attribution should follow the function, not the ownership of the equipment or the source of the salary. We accept that Halleck, Rendell-Baker and Blum mean this is not current law for the easy cases, and we accept Blum's framing that the inquiry is act-specific. We say it is satisfied where the government defines the programme, compels participation, and consumes the output, and we note that Halleck itself preserves an exception for a traditional, exclusive public function that no court has yet been asked to apply to federally mandated firearms screening.
COERCION OF FINANCIAL AND COMMERCIAL INTERMEDIARIES SHOULD BE TREATED THE SAME WHATEVER RIGHT IT BURDENS. Vullo settles that a government official may not use regulated intermediaries to punish disfavoured speech, and describes the rule as a bar on doing indirectly what one may not do directly. We argue that formulation should not be limited to speech. No court has so held.
A PERMANENT DEPRIVATION SHOULD HAVE A WORKING ROUTE BACK. Section 925(c) should be funded for individuals as it has been for corporations by the express terms of the same appropriations proviso in every act this page opened from fiscal year 2012 onward, or replaced with a mechanism that works, and the standard should be individualised. An earlier version of this sentence dated that carve-out to 1993, which is ATF's characterisation and not the text of the fiscal year 1993 rider; the correction narrows the point this page is making. Bean should be read as what it is, a holding that a defunded remedy produces no reviewable denial, and treated as a reason to fund the remedy rather than as the end of the matter. A right that can be removed for life by operation of a category, with no functioning administrative review and no statutory route to a court, is a privilege described in the language of a right.
DEPRIVATION SHOULD FOLLOW PROCESS, EXCEPT ON A GENUINE EMERGENCY SHOWING AND FOR A SHORT PERIOD. We do not argue that ex parte orders are per se unconstitutional, and we note that the one state statute examined on this page requires a hearing within fourteen days, requires clear and convincing evidence for a final order, caps that order at twelve months, and gives the respondent a right to move to vacate. We argue that the twin features the Supreme Court has actually blessed, a judicial finding about a specific person and a temporary duration, should be treated as requirements rather than as facts of the particular case, and that a statute permitting indefinite disarmament on an ex parte showing should have to justify itself. We do not know how many States meet that description, and this page does not guess.
RECORDS OF THE LAWFUL EXERCISE OF A RIGHT DESERVE MORE THAN A STATUTORY PROMISE. The limits on federal accumulation of firearms transaction records currently rest on a constraint on rulemaking, an appropriations proviso, a clause of the Brady Act, a second appropriations provision requiring destruction within twenty-four hours, and a destruction requirement in a subsection of the Gun Control Act. Those are repealable in an afternoon, and the retention rule sitting beneath them is being rewritten by proposed rule as this is published. If the interest is genuine, it should be recognised as constitutional rather than left to the fiscal year.
A CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTION SHOULD NOT TURN ON A REVENUE LINE. The National Firearms Act has rested on the taxing power since 1934, and the central registry in its present form, 26 U.S.C. section 5841, has stood on that footing since the Gun Control Act of 1968 added it. An earlier version of this passage said the registry stood for ninety years, which is the age of the Act rather than of the registry, and this page states elsewhere that the registry has existed since 1968; the two are reconciled here. In 2025 Congress set the tax to zero for most of what the Act covers, and in 2026 a district court held that what was left exceeded Congress's enumerated powers. Whatever one thinks of that ruling, and it is one district court whose own stay of its judgment ran only to August 12, 2026, with the appellate position unverified when the dockets were checked on August 11, 2026, the sequence shows something a reader should take seriously in both directions: the constitutional footing of a federal firearms programme changed because of a number in a tax statute that no one debated as a Second Amendment question. That is not how an enumerated right should be administered, and the same observation would hold if the number had moved the other way.
WHAT WE ARE NOT ARGUING. We are not arguing that background checks are unconstitutional, that licensing is unconstitutional, that dealer regulation is unconstitutional, or that the Second Amendment forbids every prohibited-person category. We are not arguing that any of the positions in this section have been adopted by any court, and we have said at every point where the authority runs the other way. And we are not arguing that this analysis resolves the tension between an armed individual's rights and a third party's safety. It does not.