Sponsors (11)
Introduced April 3, 2025 by Richard Joseph Durbin · Last progress April 3, 2025
The bill aims to reduce illegal gun diversion and improve public-safety investigations by expanding federal enforcement, data collection, and dealer security requirements—but it does so by imposing substantial compliance costs, faster enforcement powers, and broader data retention that raise privacy, due-process, and economic risks for lawful dealers, sellers, and purchasers.
Law enforcement and communities: the bill substantially increases federal inspection and enforcement capacity (more investigators, clearer inspection authority, published inspection data, and implementation timelines), which should improve detection of noncompliant dealers and reduce guns diverted to criminal markets.
Investigators, prosecutors, and policymakers: improved data collection and background-check enhancements (expanded trace-data access, longer retention of NICS/trace records, N-DEx inclusion, and searchable electronic transaction databases) will make investigations more effective and enable targeted interventions against trafficking.
Customers and the public: the bill raises minimum physical-security, inventory, and recordkeeping standards for licensed manufacturers, importers, and dealers (safes, cameras, quarterly inventories, lost/stolen reporting), reducing thefts and making diversion easier to detect.
Small licensed firearm businesses and hobbyist sellers: the bill imposes broad, recurring compliance costs (security upgrades, quarterly inventories, electronic recordkeeping, surveillance, fees, audits, and more frequent inspections) that will materially raise operating expenses and could squeeze margins or force some closures.
Gun purchasers and the public: the centralized retention and expanded sharing of trace, background-check, and transaction data — plus required in-store video retention — significantly increase privacy risks and the volume of sensitive personal/business data held by the federal government.
Lawful dealers and employees: the law authorizes faster suspensions, revocations, fines, and loss-of-license consequences (sometimes immediate), creating a substantial risk of abrupt business disruption, lost income, and personal hardship for licensees who face alleged violations.
Based on analysis of 56 sections of legislative text.
Tightens oversight of federal firearms licensees: more inspections, mandatory security plans and inventory reporting, new licensed marketplace facilitators, expanded recordkeeping and ATF databases, and steeper penalties.
Tightens federal regulation of firearms businesses by expanding ATF inspection authority, requiring written security plans and quarterly inventory controls, creating a new licensed “facilitator” category for online/marketplace intermediaries with a $1,000 annual fee, and increasing civil/criminal penalties for violations. It also requires dealers to run NICS checks for employees, retain and expand sales and background-check records, build an ATF-searchable electronic records system, repeal prior limits on ATF use of trace and background-check data, and authorize hundreds of new ATF industry-operation investigators to enforce the rules. The law adds new reporting and notification duties for dealers (including same-day transfer notices and multiple-sale reporting), requires distributors to post and hand out safety/suicide-prevention materials, narrows certain legal defenses and mens rea standards (changing “willful” to “knowing” in several offenses), and directs the Attorney General to issue implementing regulations and reports to Congress within specified timelines (many actions within 1–3 years).