Attorney General Todd Blanche has launched a new federal application process allowing people stripped of their gun rights by criminal convictions to seek restoration, a move that bypasses a three-decade congressional blockade and draws sharp criticism from gun-control advocates.
The Department of Justice on Monday finalized a rule establishing the Federal Firearm Rights Restoration program, an online portal where individuals barred from possessing firearms can apply on a case-by-case basis to have that prohibition lifted. The New York Post reported that the DOJ will weigh each applicant's record and reputation to determine whether they pose a likely threat to public safety before granting relief.
Pardon Attorney Ed Martin put the scale of the program in blunt terms: roughly 30 million Americans have lost their Second Amendment rights and could potentially benefit. The DOJ estimated it could receive as many as 330,000 applications in the program's first year alone, a figure the department called "not an unreasonable estimate" based on the number of ex-convicts who tried to purchase firearms over the past three years.
The new rule fills a vacuum that has existed since 1992, when Congress defunded the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives program responsible for processing individual gun-rights restoration applications. That rider, renewed every year since, did not repeal the underlying authority. It simply starved the ATF of the money to act on it, leaving millions of Americans with no federal avenue to petition for a right the Constitution guarantees.
For more than three decades, a person convicted of a nonviolent federal felony had no way to ask Washington whether the ban still made sense. The Blanche DOJ's answer is a new online portal at justice.gov/ffrr, where applicants can submit their case for individual review.
Blanche framed the rule as both a constitutional obligation and a public-safety measure:
"The Second Amendment is not a second-class right, and the federal government should not permanently deprive Americans of a constitutional right without regard to whether they pose a danger to public safety. This rule establishes a rigorous, commonsense process that protects the public while giving deserving Americans a real path to restoration."
Ed Martin was more succinct. "President Trump keeps making history," he said, calling the finalized rule a step toward "unprecedented restoration of firearms rights."
Critics of the program have tried to cast it as a blanket giveaway. The rule's own terms say otherwise. AP News reported that people convicted of violent crimes, including domestic abuse, sexual assault, robbery, and terrorism, "will be denied, absent extraordinary circumstances." Registered sex offenders, illegal immigrants, individuals with certain mental-health-related disabilities, and drug addicts will also face presumptive denial.
Marijuana users are carved out from the drug-addiction bar, a distinction that tracks with shifting federal enforcement postures on cannabis but is not explained further in the rule's public summary.
Each applicant must demonstrate that restoring their rights would not endanger the public and that granting relief serves the public interest, Breitbart reported. The burden falls on the individual, not the government, a structure that mirrors how pardon and clemency petitions already work.
Kris Brown, president of the gun-control advocacy group Brady, said her organization was still reviewing the final regulation but wasted little time signaling opposition. Brown stressed the need for a "robust and thoughtful system that minimizes the risk to public safety", then argued the Trump administration has already disqualified itself from running one.
"Yet the Trump administration has consistently shown us they have no such discretion, including by restoring gun rights to convicted domestic abusers and violent January 6 insurrectionists, and by tirelessly rolling back broad policies proven to prevent crime and gun violence."
Brown's statement conflates separate actions, individual clemency decisions and a new regulatory framework with built-in denial categories, as though they share the same standard. The finalized rule explicitly lists domestic abusers among those presumptively barred from relief. Whether the administration applies that bar consistently is a fair question. Whether the rule itself ignores violent offenders is not, the text says otherwise.
On the other side, the Second Amendment Foundation welcomed the announcement. The pro-gun group posted on X that the development represented "an exciting next step in the process of ensuring the civil rights of all Americans are respected while only those proven dangerous to society are disarmed." The foundation added that it was still reviewing the final regulation's details.
Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Georgia Republican, tied the rule to a broader pattern of Second Amendment gains under the current administration. "Our court victory against NFA registration is the greatest Second Amendment legal win in American history," Clyde said, referencing a separate DOJ decision not to challenge a court ruling that struck down regulations on firearm suppressors and certain guns.
That June decision and Monday's finalized rule together mark a DOJ that has moved aggressively to widen firearms access through both litigation strategy and administrative rulemaking, a sharp reversal from prior administrations that treated gun restrictions as a one-way ratchet.
For all its specificity on who will likely be denied, the finalized rule leaves significant gaps. The DOJ has not publicly detailed how it will fund and staff the review process, a relevant concern given that the original ATF program collapsed precisely because Congress cut its budget. Whether the department can absorb 330,000 applications in year one without bottlenecks or rubber-stamping remains to be seen.
The rule also does not clarify what qualifies as the "extraordinary circumstances" that could override a presumptive denial for violent offenders. That phrase does real legal work, it is the exception that could swallow the rule, and its boundaries will likely be tested early and often.
Nor is it clear whether the program covers state-level convictions or only federal ones, a distinction that matters enormously given that the vast majority of felony prosecutions in America happen in state courts. And the DOJ acknowledged it "cannot predict with certainty how many applications it may receive," suggesting even the 330,000 figure is a rough baseline rather than a hard projection.
Blanche, confirmed by the Senate in a 50-49 vote, has moved quickly since taking over the department. Monday's rule is among the most consequential regulatory actions of his tenure so far, not because it hands firearms to dangerous people, but because it forces the federal government to justify, case by case, why a citizen who has served a sentence should remain stripped of a constitutional right permanently.
For 34 years, Congress avoided that question by defunding the office that was supposed to answer it. Now the DOJ has built a new door. The fight will be over who gets to walk through it, and whether the government can handle the line.
