The gun control lobby is engaged in a large-scale effort to mislead the American public about the ATF's efforts to reform and modernize many of its regulations, and now the CEO Emeritus of New York's largest healthcare provider is getting in on the misinformation campaign.
In a new op-ed aimed at fellow healthcare executives, Michael Dowling claims that the ATF is "eliminating about three dozen regulations pertaining to purchasing, selling and owning firearms," which is blatantly false. The ATF is looking to repeal some of the rules put in place during the Biden administration, including its overly broad definition of who is "engaged in the business" of dealing firearms, and a rule treating most brace-equipped pistols as short-barreled rifles, but most of the ATF's efforts are aimed at changing existing rules, not eliminating them entirely.
Among the regulatory changes, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ has eased restrictions aimed at preventing mentally ill individuals from owning firearms, and rescinded a Biden-era Enhanced Regulatory Enforcement Policy that revoked the licenses of firearm dealers who intentionally falsified records or sold weapons without running a background check.
In the three years (2022-24) after the so-called “zero tolerance” policy was implemented in October 2021, the ATF stripped the licenses of 477 gun dealers nationwide. Within weeks of beginning his second term in February 2025, President Trump rescinded the policy, and the number of license revocations subsequently dropped to 56 in 2025, compared to 183 in 2024.
The ATF wants to clarify that an appointment of a fiduciary to help manage financial affairs does not equate to an "adjudication of mental illness", and Congress has already essentially said the same thing. The "Enhanced Regulatory Enforcement Policy" was better known as Biden's "zero-tolerance" policy for federal firearm licensees, and among the hundreds of gun dealers who were stripped of their licenses were FFLs guilty of nothing more than minor paperwork errors. Instead of treating those errors as inadvertent mistakes, the policy required the ATF to treat them as "willful" violations. Selling guns without running a background check is still very much a no-no, even without the "zero tolerance" policy, and doing so could easily lead to a license revocation now just as it did during the previous administration.
Dowling isn't just upset with the ATF, though. He's also ticked about the DOJ going after states and localities that are violating our Second Amendment rights.
Since last September, the U.S. Department of Justice has filed seven lawsuits challenging state and local gun laws. Most recently on July 1, just hours after new laws took effect, the DOJ sued Virginia to overturn its ban on semi-automatic weapons and California for its restrictions on the sale of Glock-style handguns, which have trigger designs that can be altered into fully automatic weapons.
Now is not the time to retreat from the meaningful progress we’ve achieved in making our communities safer from gun violence. The federal Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, enacted in 2022 with the support of both Democrats and Republicans one month after the fatal shooting of 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, TX, has contributed to the significant decline in firearm deaths since they reached an all-time high of 48,830 in 2021, as have a spate of state and local laws.
The only people who are crediting the BSCA for the historic drop in crime we've seen over the past few years are gun control advocates. The same is true for anyone pointing to the "spate of state and local" gun control laws. In truth, some of the biggest declines we've seen have been in permitless carry states. And of course, anti-gun activists predicted the opposite would happen when the Supreme Court struck down "may issue" carry regimes in 2022.
Dowling repeats the false claim that guns are the number one killer of "children and adolescents" in the United States, which is only true if you leave out kids under the age of 1. The vast majority of those deaths are seen in young men between the ages of 15 and 17, and firearms are not the leading cause of death for children 14 and younger.
Dowling's most outrageous claim may be this one.
I support Second Amendment rights, but I reject the notion that our current laws and policies are depriving law-abiding Americans of their right to bear arms, considering there are far more guns — an estimated 500 million civilian-owned firearms — than people in this country.
He supports the Second Amendment, but he can't think of a single law or policy that is depriving people of their right to bear arms? What about the cities and counties in California where it costs more than $1,000 to simply apply for a concealed carry permit? What about the states that make it impossible to legally bear arms in places that are "sensitive" in name only, with no special security measures or police in place to protect people? What about the laws that make it impossible for young adults to access their Second Amendment rights, or those that deprive people convicted of non-violent felonies from owning a gun in the future?
If Dowling truly believes that he supports Second Amendment rights, I'd love to know what he thinks would violate our right to keep and bear arms.
I think the truth is much simpler. I don't believe Dowling really cares about the Second Amendment at all, which is his right. The problem is that Dowling seems to believe that the only way to significantly bring down gun-involved deaths is through more gun control, when that clearly isn't the case. Homicides are at historic lows, and there have never been more guns in the hands of American citizens than there are today. Dowling is fundamentally misdiagnosing the problem, and his "treatment" will do far more harm than good.
