Sponsors (2)
The bill directs federal funding and new criminal and regulatory rules to reduce gun violence, improve traceability, and protect vulnerable people, but it increases federal oversight, compliance costs, privacy and due-process risks, and the chance that ordinary owners face criminal or civil liability.
Millions of Americans and law enforcement: stronger background checks, one-gun-per-30-days limits, licensed-intermediary requirements for many private transfers, and ERPO reporting to NICS reduce illicit trafficking and make it harder for prohibited people to buy guns.
Children, youth, and families: an age-based ban on minors possessing assault weapons plus secure-storage provisions reduce youth access to high-capacity firearms and lower risks of child injury and school-involved incidents.
Law enforcement and investigators: requiring serialized frames/receivers, banning undetectable firearms, and entering lost/stolen guns into national systems improves traceability and the ability to solve and deter violent crime.
Many gun owners and sellers: expanded definitions of 'assault weapons' and enhanced criminal penalties increase the risk that previously lawful possession or sales become criminal conduct, exposing owners and sellers to significant legal risk.
Private individuals and gun owners broadly: increased federal oversight, Attorney General regulatory authority, mandatory reporting, and data-sharing create new paperwork, administrative burdens, and heightened privacy risks.
Small dealers, private sellers, and buyers: requiring licensed intermediaries to run full background-check procedures for private transfers and other compliance rules raises costs, may increase transfer fees, and could reduce willingness of dealers to facilitate transfers.
Based on analysis of 5 sections of legislative text.
Tightens private firearm transfers, creates ERPO and domestic-violence relinquishment grant programs, requires lost/stolen reporting and secure-storage duties, adds location bans and a misdemeanor-hate-crime disqualification.
Official title: Reform Federal firearms laws, and for other purposes.
Introduced April 16, 2026 by Timothy Michael Kaine · Last progress April 16, 2026
Makes multiple changes to federal firearms law: it restricts private person-to-person transfers by requiring licensed dealers to intermediate certain transfers, creates new criminal and civil duties to report lost or stolen guns and to secure loaded firearms that could endanger minors, and expands who is disqualified from possessing firearms to include those convicted of misdemeanor hate crimes. It also creates DOJ grant programs for states, tribes, and localities to adopt and implement Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) laws and domestic-violence-related firearm relinquishment laws, sets minimum requirements for those laws, and funds training, firearm removal/storage, data collection, and related program development. The bill adds location-based possession bans (colleges and mental-health facility zones), establishes penalties and reporting requirements, and includes regulatory and grant conditions (including minimum allocations for law-enforcement training and data work). Some new criminal provisions become effective 180 days after enactment; grant and program provisions are implemented through the DOJ COPS Office and BJA discretionary-grant preferences over specified fiscal years.