A Trump administration proposal to let Americans buy guns entirely online and have them shipped to their homes could deliver a windfall to GrabAGun, the online firearms retailer where Donald Trump Jr. is a shareholder and board member, Mother Jones reported on Friday.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives calls it the Non-Over-the-Counter rule. Today, someone who orders a gun online generally must go in person to a federally licensed dealer to verify identity, pass a background check and pick up the weapon. Under the proposal, eligible in-state buyers would verify their identities online, undergo the background check and have the gun shipped to their door without ever entering a store.
The agency estimates that as many as half of all gun buyers might choose fully remote sales.
GrabAGun bills itself as the “Amazon of Guns” and has told investors it is “uniquely positioned to capitalize on this potential opportunity.” Mr. Trump is its public face, and promoted the company’s model to Bloomberg last July, before it listed on the New York Stock Exchange. “GrabAGun allows you to [buy a gun] the way you’d buy everything else, like you would on Amazon if you’re buying home décor or other goods,” he said, calling it a convenience “in an age where our right to bear arms is under constant attack from anti-gun politicians and woke corporations.”
Months before the A.T.F. unveiled the proposal, the company moved to expand. In January it started PEW Logistics, a subsidiary offering firearms manufacturers what it calls a “white-label direct-to-consumer fulfillment solution.” Four months later, the agency announced the proposed rule.
That sequence drew questions from Democratic Senators Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, who wrote in a July letter to Todd Blanche, then the acting attorney general: “It appears that GrabAGun had information about the potential change in the regulatory landscape and made a series of business decisions to capitalize on the moment.” They pressed the Justice Department on whether Mr. Trump’s business ties influenced the rule.
Andrew Surabian, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said the president’s son had “zero involvement in this particular decision.” “Don is a lifelong businessman and vocal advocate of our Second Amendment rights,” Mr. Surabian said in a statement to Reuters. “He does not interface with the Federal Government as part of his role with any company that he invests in or advises.”
Robert Cekada, the A.T.F. director, also rejected the ethics concerns, saying the agency “has had no engagement with any retailer in developing [the rule].” The agency describes the proposal as a way to modernize gun sales using advances in remote identity verification.
The plan has alarmed gun control advocates and parts of the firearms industry itself, who say ending face-to-face sales would make it harder to catch suspicious buyers and easier for guns to reach the criminal market. Jon Lowy, the founder and president of Global Action on Gun Violence and a longtime gun violence prevention lawyer, called it “probably the most dangerous action taken by the US government to increase gun violence.”
“A brief video interaction cannot detect if the purchaser is actually an illegal straw purchaser buying for someone else, a gun trafficker just supplying the criminal market, somebody who’s intoxicated, somebody who is on drugs, someone who is clearly mentally unstable and dangerous,” Mr. Lowy said. “I really was shocked.”
Straw purchases, in which a person illegally buys a gun for someone else, are among the most common sources of trafficked firearms, according to federal data. For more than 25 years the A.T.F. and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the industry’s largest trade group, have run a joint campaign teaching dealers to spot them. Earlier this year, Mr. Cekada told the Senate Judiciary Committee that licensed dealers are “our first line of defense in the fight against firearms trafficking.”
In August, the trade group told the agency its members were “overwhelmingly opposed” to the rule, warning that remote sales “would be exploited by bad actors to conduct illegal straw purchases.”
“When you have an online background check you lose the emotional point,” Marc Bernstein, a Florida gun dealer, told Spectrum News 13. “A lot of the ways that we stop straw purchases are through conversations and we terminate the sale right away. And it happens pretty frequently.” Mr. Bernstein said his store halts such a sale at least once a week.
The proposal is one of many changes the administration has made to federal firearms rules this year. Last month the Justice Department concluded that the ban on selling handguns to 18- to 20-year-olds is unconstitutional and said it would no longer be criminally enforced.
The rule remains under review and, if finalized, is likely to face a court challenge, though it is unclear whether litigation would delay it. “I’ve spent most of my career trying to stop the flow of crime guns,” Mr. Lowy said. “Then this whole other mechanism that makes it completely easy and seems largely untouchable is created, and it looks like there’s virtually nothing you can do about it.”