Friday, May 15, 2026, episode of the podcast The Excerpt: ATF will significantly reduce gun dealer license revocations in 2025, signaling a change under President Donald Trump. As revealed in a recent hearing, the agency also stopped publishing revoked dealers, citing gun owner and industry privacy. USA TODAY investigative reporter Nick Penzenstadler joins The Excerpt to uncover what’s behind the change and what it means.
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Dana Taylor:
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, better known as ATF, dramatically reduced the number of gun dealers with revoked licenses last year and signaled new efforts under President Donald Trump. One of the practices the ATF has eliminated is publicizing canceled dealers, and just yesterday it held a public hearing focused on how to protect the privacy of both gun owners and the gun industry. Is this a move towards fairer enforcement or a step back from oversight? Hello. Welcome to this excerpt from USA TODAY. I’m Dana Taylor. Today is Friday, May 15, 2026. USA TODAY investigative reporter Nick Penzenstadler joins me to discuss why the ATF stripped licenses from fewer gun stores in 2025. It’s great to talk to you, Nick.
Nick Penzenstadler:
Thank you, Danna. Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Nick, some people may immediately think of politics when they hear ATF, but the numbers speak for themselves here. Only 56 gun sales licenses will be revoked in 2025, down from 183 in 2024. What has actually changed within the authorities?
Nick Penzenstadler:
I mean, this has been a political football for years, and we’ve followed suit, and we’ve had some administrations, especially the Biden administration, focus on cracking down on trafficking and gun stores. Then Trump was elected, and immediately after taking the oath of office, he signed an executive order saying some of these policies needed to be revisited. As a result, leniency for gun shops and gun licensees is back in the instruction manual. In other words, they are taking fewer licenses and giving people more opportunities, and the number of revoked licenses reflects that.
Dana Taylor:
How unusual is this decline, not just in recent years, but when you look back further back?
Nick Penzenstadler:
Yes, the Trump-era numbers go back to 2016 and 2017. Looking back, there were only a few dozen stores compared to well over 100 during the Biden administration. And remember, back then, just a few years ago, the ATF was doing this enhanced enforcement and taking this very seriously and revoking licenses more quickly.
Dana Taylor:
Last year’s decline coincided with the end of the Biden administration’s zero-tolerance policy. What did Zero Tolerance do? What types of violations were reported?
Nick Penzenstadler:
Yes, this is explained in different ways. This is an enhanced enforcement policy to crack down on serious violations and so-called willful offenders at gun dealers who ignore the law, know they’re doing something wrong, and keep doing it anyway. Opponents describe this as a paperwork, administrative, and unimportant issue, but in reality, they’re talking about things like selling guns without properly conducting background checks, or not keeping records that are critical for the ATF to track those firearms in the future and for law enforcement to solve crimes. So depending on how you look at this, they could be a minor clerical error or a very important crime-fighting tool.
Dana Taylor:
New ATF Director Robert Secada announced 34 proposed rules. Nick, what are the agency’s priorities right now, and what has the response been like from both advocacy groups and the gun sales industry?
Nick Penzenstadler:
Yeah. Gun violence prevention officials were appalled by many of these rules, particularly the reversal of their commitment to this project. What that means is, where are the boundaries? Do you go to gun shows and do it as a hobby, or do you routinely sell a few guns a month and process credit cards and this is your main source of income? The Biden administration has made it a rule that you’re no longer just a hobbyist, you’re in the business of selling guns. One of the key rollbacks announced recently is ending that policy and reverting to a different policy to give enthusiasts a little more leeway.
Dana Taylor:
Why did the Trump administration want this change?
Nick Penzenstadler:
Well, the ambiguity has always existed, and many administrations have promised to put a number on it or draw some sort of line. But the real concern here is that there are unfettered and untracked gun dealers. And of course, when you become a federally licensed dealer, you’re subject to even more scrutiny, doing all the paperwork and, of course, fulfilling your background check needs. So private sellers don’t have to. And the idea behind this change is that there are groups doing sales and they need a license, but the director stressed that they have measured the impact of new registrations and believe it is minimal. Therefore, they did not consider this to be an effective rule change.
Dana Taylor:
Nick, as I mentioned earlier, one of the practices that the ATF has abolished is the public listing of revoked dealers, and you wrote about this as a campaign to brand gun industry leaders with infamy and shame. Coach Secada spoke about this at yesterday’s hearing. Let’s listen.
Robert Secada:
We should hold people accountable and be honest about what the data shows. These DL2 lists were not designed by me or anyone else to be used as a defamation campaign, but that is exactly what they were used for, and that was not their purpose.
Dana Taylor:
What is the main argument here, and is there any basis for it?
Nick Penzenstadler:
A few things happen here. Under the previous administration, a new practice was introduced to publicly disclose firearms dealers whose licenses had been revoked, their regulatory history leading up to the revocation, and the paperwork behind it. Typically, it’s years of inspection by ATF inspectors, and the audit finds significant violations and that’s why someone is removed from this program. You lost your privileges and can no longer sell guns. There’s also an obscure program of this kind called DL2. This is a Demand Letter 2 program that annually targets the dealers who have sold the most guns of 25 or more recovered at crime scenes or within a short period of time between crimes. So they sold it and somehow the bad guys got their hands on it and it showed up at the crime scene, so there was evidence storage.
So, of course, this is going to be a lot of the big dealers, the people who sell the most guns, but it also reflects where crime guns come from. So gun violence prevention organizations and the media took these lists and used them to shine a light. If you want to know where crime guns are sold and where straw buyers are targeting gun stores, check out this list. And of course, this caused tension because the gun industry didn’t like this attention. They say it unfairly characterizes them. The Director-General yesterday said it was not intended to be used for this purpose and the data was being manipulated. That’s why we needed to pause. Another interesting thing about this whole discussion is that Georgia Republican Andrew Clyde himself is a gun store owner, and his store is on that list. The store sells more than 25 guns found at crime scenes, which he said he was sensitive about and that the store was unfairly targeted by being on the list.
Dana Taylor:
I would now like to take a look at some of the 56 dealers whose licenses were revoked in 2025. Some have closed permanently, while others have reopened. Let’s start with the ones that are closed. What happened at Grips by Rally, an Arizona shop whose license was revoked?
Nick Penzenstadler:
Yeah. So when I got this list just recently, this name jumped off the page. This Arizona store made headlines in 2025 after its owner was indicted in a gun trafficking case. And with this new administration and a renewed focus on Mexican cartels, just in March, a superseding indictment was handed down accusing the scheme and the owner of this store of supporting terrorism, since these cartels are designated as foreign terrorists. As a result, these charges have taken on more serious meaning, and the store has now been targeted by the ATF and placed on this list for having its license revoked.
Dana Taylor:
And, as I mentioned, some have reopened under new owners or new brands. What did John Duncan tell you about the gun store he runs with his wife in Leesburg, Ohio?
Nick Penzenstadler:
Yes, it was great. I was able to connect with the owner of this gun store after they announced on their Facebook page that they had closed last August. They did not explain why, but it has since reopened under a new name. And of course in the list I saw that they were canceled. Therefore, the previous license was revoked. They were audited. The owner spoke to me and said, “We made some mistakes and felt embarrassed,” but he had a problem with the administration’s response. He felt targeted, he felt embarrassed, and he felt they were making a point. So he was able to reopen the store under a different administration, change the name, and resume selling guns. So he’s part of this new regime where he’s been invited to either reapply for his old license or sort things out and restart under a new name.
Dana Taylor:
Nick, one thing to note is that gun dealer records are not reset. Enforcement records remain cumulative. Does that mean that the current seeming shift towards permissiveness may be temporary?
Nick Penzenstadler:
that’s right. In short, the experts and lawyers we spoke to warned that if you feel like a new day has begun, with Trump as president and a friendly administration, it’s important to remember that your record is under scrutiny over time. This means that when you get tested in two years, you’ll be looking back at how you handle documents today. And these proposed rules have not yet been finalized, as it is important that changes are proposed by the ATF. So, the point is, these are still regulations that need to be followed and your record will last well into the future, so you should just follow the book.
Dana Taylor:
What was your biggest takeaway from yesterday’s oversight hearing?
Nick Penzenstadler:
Well, I think it’s really interesting. There are tensions around privacy and gun rights, different groups and interests, and everyone wants more information. The media wants more information, and some advocacy groups want more information, but that conflicts with privacy, and gun owners are notoriously private and don’t want their information shared, and they don’t want the names of gun dealers shared inappropriately. So these things are always under tension. And I think you saw in the hearing that they were at odds with each other.
Dana Taylor:
Nick Penzenstadler is an investigative reporter for USA TODAY. I’m really glad to have you.
Nick Penzenstadler:
thank you.
Dana Taylor:
We would like to thank Senior Producer Kaely Monahan for her production assistance. Executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think about this episode by sending a note to the podcast at usatoday.com. Thank you for your attention. I’m Dana Taylor. We’ll be back Monday morning with another episode of USA TODAY’s The Excerpt.
