Who Benefits When Abusers Get Guns? Follow the Money.
Restoring gun rights to dangerous individuals isn’t about freedom. It’s about profits.
Yesterday, a DOJ attorney specializing in pardons was fired by the Trump Administration because she refused to restore gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson, who in addition to being a “Friend of Donald Trump” is a convicted domestic abuser.
The fired attorney revealed that she was placed on a “working group to restore gun rights to people convicted of crimes.” So while domestic abuser and friend of Trump, Mel Gibson, may have his gun rights restored, absent more, we would not be asking you to go full bore on Mel. Because roasting Hollywood has-beens just doesn’t matter much, nor does making an exception to restoration of rights to just him. But that’s not what this is really about — there’s more.
What’s afoot is a much larger, reckless and lethal agenda: restoration of gun rights en masse to individuals our society decided long ago SHOULD NEVER HAVE ACCESS TO FIREARMS. This is as unprecedented and troubling as you imagine. To unpack this, let’s start at the law as it exists today. More than 30 years ago, in 1993, when the Brady Bill (my organization's namesake) was passed and created our nation’s background check system for gun sales, Congress also made it unlawful for the Department of Justice to restore rights to prohibited purchasers, or people who cannot legally possess guns, like minors, traffickers, and domestic abusers. These restrictions were based on a simple principle: if someone is in the Brady Background Check system, they should remain there for life. The decision to remove individuals should not be subject to political influence or subjective standards set by the Department of Justice.
As a result, under current law, gun rights can only be restored pursuant to a Presidential pardon. It is therefore UNLAWFUL for Trump to restore gun rights at all through the DOJ, let alone en masse, absent specific authorization from Congress. But, as we have seen, Trump and his DOJ believe the law is a tool that benefits their friends and a cudgel to punish their enemies. Here, the tragedy of that outcome for our democracy and for individual liberty—literally the right to live and not be shot dead by an assailant armed with the assistance of your government—could not be more clear.
Guns in the hands of domestic abusers means their partners die. That is just a fact. The mere presence of a firearm is a key factor in the all-too-common transformation of abusive partners into killers, and the data proves this:
Women of any race or ethnicity are five times more likely to be killed by an abusive intimate partner when a gun is present during an incident of domestic violence.
Every 15 hours, a woman in the United States is shot and killed by a current or former partner.
In a country where one-third of women and one-quarter of men are victims of physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner at least once in their lifetime, the issue of domestic violence cuts across racial, gender, economic, sexual, generational, and religious divides.
Black women in this country experience domestic violence at disproportionately high rates, and are twice as likely to be fatally shot by an intimate partner as their white counterparts.
Arming domestic violence abusers makes us all far less safe. Unsurprisingly, those who commit domestic violence are threats in other ways as well. A U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment study found that 41% of people who carried out a mass attack between 2016 and 2020 had a history of domestic violence.
The irony of this happening during Women’s History Month seems to be lost on this Administration. Despite that grim reality made better by the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, and even the historic passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (supported by 16 Republicans in the United States Senate) that ensured guns are removed from abusers permanently even where the abuser is not married to the victim, there are two clear winners in upending our entire system of public safety laws to allow criminals to have their rights to purchase firearms restored: the gun industry and Donald Trump. Because the gun industry is desperate for new customers. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the gun industry experienced a massive surge in sales. Nearly 60 million guns were sold between 2020 and 2022, with one in five American households purchasing firearms and 5% of all Americans becoming first-time gun owners.
With gun sales dropping back to below pre-pandemic levels, a market already saturated in firearms, and profit margins declining, the industry is looking to a class of new customers which has long been closed off to them: people who cannot legally own guns.
The truth behind all of this is painfully obvious. There are tens of millions of people who are prohibited from buying guns in the United States. That’s a big, big market to this industry with flagging sales. It’s a market that includes people with a propensity to violence that would love to legally purchase firearms. The more people who have been convicted of crimes buy guns, the richer the industry gets. This creates a dangerous feedback loop—where the industry profits from arming 'bad guys', then turns around and convinces Americans to buy guns to protect themselves from the very threat they helped create.
But the cycle doesn’t end there—what starts as a profit-driven scheme to arm dangerous individuals quickly turns into political influence that fuels even more reckless policies. The more money the gun industry has, the more they can throw at politicians. And that means Donald Trump. In his quest to do the gun industry’s bidding and create new markets for guns—in this case the approximately 24 million felons prohibited from purchasing firearms in this country—Trump would literally sign a death sentence for Americans who have already suffered abuse and near death experiences at the hands of perpetrators only stopped from purchasing firearms by the permanent prohibition put in place by Congress and the Brady Background Check system.
This is all against a backdrop of a President who says he is “tough on crime” while arming criminals and attempting to dismantle the system of laws we have that has resulted in an unprecedented reduction of violent crime. For Trump, his playbook is Orwellian: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” (Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four). Don’t believe what you see or hear. Ignore the facts. But we do so at our peril.
Restoring gun rights in the manner we understand he wants to take is extremely dangerous and will result in Americans getting killed by known dangerous individuals. We cannot let the current occupant of the White House and his gun industry backers rewrite the rules and put guns back in the hands of individuals convicted of serious offenses like domestic abuse. Your representative will be back in your district next week. Call their district offices. Show up at town halls. Ask them if they are ok with Trump arming domestic abusers and other dangerous criminals. Make your voice heard and bring a friend who might feel hopeless or helpless at the moment but who will see, with collective action, we can stop bad things from happening. And one simple way to take action today? Sign our petition to make it clear: prohibited purchasers shouldn’t have access to guns
Thanks for actually standing up. In the process count yourself as someone who is saving lives. And that is worth everything.