What The Hell America!

A wave of behind-the-scenes policy shifts is clearing the way for armed abusers—putting women’s lives in even greater danger.

Ahead of the presidential election, I wrote about how dangerous Project 2025 was for women, especially its radical “guns everywhere” agenda. Its vision of a country flooded with guns, stripped of safeguards, was alarming then. Now it’s becoming reality.

Last month, The New York Times revealed that a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney was fired by the Trump administration after refusing to restore gun rights to actor Mel Gibson, a convicted domestic abuser. But the deeper issue is more alarming: She was on a “working group to restore gun rights to people convicted of crimes.” 

This points to a dangerous broader agenda of the Trump administration: rearming people with criminal convictions, including domestic abusers. Shortly after I raised alarm bells, it was announced that Gibson, along with nine others, would have his gun rights restored.

Since 1992, Congress has prohibited the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from using federal funds to restore gun rights to prohibited individuals. Receiving a presidential pardon has been the only path for restoration. We have long recognized that gun rights should only ever be restored through a structured system that assesses danger and risk. However, reports suggest the Trump administration is, at best, instituting a pay-to-play system that could arm the highest bidder, or at worst, automating a process that could arm those with criminal histories and dangerous behaviors.

The end result? Trump restored gun rights to a man who admitted to abusing his girlfriend—and is a friend of the president. In a reality where domestic abusers are armed, women will suffer most.

The statistics are not up for debate. A gun in a domestic violence situation makes a woman five times more likely to be killed. Homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant and postpartum women, with 68 percent of those homicides involving firearms. Black women face higher rates of intimate partner violence and are more likely than white women to be fatally shot. Forty-one percent of perpetrators in mass shootings between 2016 and 2020 had a history of domestic violence.

So why would any administration push policies that arm abusers?

As always, follow the money. 

During the pandemic, the gun industry saw record sales. Nearly 60 million guns were sold between 2020 and 2022. But sales have since dropped below pre-pandemic levels, and the industry is eyeing a new market: people who legally can’t own guns.

The cycle is grotesque: The industry helps arm dangerous people, then tells the rest of us to buy more guns to protect ourselves. This isn’t public safety—it’s a business model built on fear, bloodshed and bodies.

This same dangerous ideology is behind the so-called Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, recently advanced by the House Judiciary Committee. The bill would force every state to recognize concealed-carry laws from any other state, including those with no permit or training requirements. That means someone from a permitless carry state like Arkansas could legally carry a hidden, loaded handgun into a state with strong gun laws like New Jersey. 

Paired with rearming violent offenders, it creates a nightmare scenario for survivors of domestic abuse. Imagine a survivor fleeing their abuser across state lines, only to find that their abuser is now legally armed despite a prior conviction. The abuser lives in a state that allows permitless carry, and can now stalk the survivor with a loaded handgun, even if the survivor fled to a state with stricter protections. While stalking remains illegal, the ability to do so while lawfully armed makes it far more dangerous. Both policies gut state-level protections and empower the very individuals our gun laws were created to disarm.

As if that weren’t alarming enough, the DOJ is quietly dismantling the ATF. News broke on April 10 that acting ATF director Kash Patel was replaced with Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll—appointing the Pentagon official two separate leadership roles across two distinct government agencies for the first time in the ATF’s five-decade history. The administration has reportedly considered merging the ATF with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which would further weaken its ability to inspect gun dealers and enforce gun laws. With 80 percent of the ATF’s roughly 2,500 agents already reassigned to immigration enforcement, resources are already stretched thin.

America has more gun dealers than Starbucks and McDonald’s combined. Yet about 5 percent of them are responsible for the vast majority of guns recovered in crimes. A well-resourced ATF can shut them down. Under Biden, such efforts helped drive violent crime to a 50-year low.

But slowly killing the ATF’s mission—through leadership changes, agent reassignments or by folding it into another agency—means fewer inspections, less oversight and more illegal guns on our streets.

This would be especially catastrophic for women in marginalized communities. The communities hit hardest by the actions of an industry that prioritizes profits over safety are often Black and Brown neighborhoods. People in these communities face compounding risks: underfunded services, over-policing and now, weakened enforcement of the few safeguards that exist.

Taken together, these actions are not about public safety. It’s state-sponsored violence, packaged as policy and bureaucratic efficiency. And we will pay the highest price.