Abolish the ATF and Return Lawmaking Authority to Congress

Petition directed to:
The United States Congress, the President of the United States, the Attorney General, and the House and Senate Judiciary and Appropriations Committees

Our Demand

We, the undersigned, call upon Congress to abolish the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as a standalone federal agency, end funding for its current bureaucratic structure, and transfer its legitimate violent-crime, explosives, arson, and trafficking responsibilities to appropriate existing federal law-enforcement agencies.

We further demand that Congress—not unelected federal administrators—write clear and specific firearms laws that ordinary Americans can understand and follow.

Why This Petition Matters

The Constitution gives Congress the power to make federal laws. Executive agencies are supposed to enforce those laws—not repeatedly expand, rewrite, or reinterpret them through administrative rules that can expose Americans to serious criminal penalties.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Garland v. Cargill demonstrated the danger of allowing an enforcement agency to stretch a criminal statute beyond the language enacted by Congress. The Court concluded that bump stocks did not meet the statutory definition of a machine gun. Regardless of anyone’s personal opinion about bump stocks, the constitutional principle is straightforward: when federal law needs to be changed, Congress must change it.

No federal agency should be able to transform previously lawful conduct into a potential felony through changing interpretations, internal guidance, open letters, or administrative rulemaking.

Law-abiding firearm owners, veterans, collectors, gunsmiths, manufacturers, and federally licensed firearm dealers deserve clear, stable, and constitutionally sound laws. They should not be forced to navigate rules that change whenever a new administration or agency official takes office.

The ATF currently receives more than a billion dollars annually from taxpayers. Americans have the right to demand that this money be spent on directly combating violent criminals rather than maintaining a separate bureaucracy capable of imposing shifting regulatory interpretations upon people attempting to obey the law.

Abolishing the ATF Does Not Mean Abandoning Public Safety

This petition does not call for ending investigations into murderers, armed traffickers, terrorists, bombmakers, criminal organizations, or people who illegally use firearms to commit violent crimes.

Those offenders should be investigated, arrested, prosecuted, and—when convicted—punished appropriately.

ATF’s legitimate public-safety responsibilities can be transferred to agencies with established violent-crime, organized-crime, terrorism, forensic, and interstate investigative capabilities. Specialized fire laboratories, explosives databases, crime-gun intelligence systems, and training programs that genuinely assist state and local investigators should be preserved under a carefully supervised transition.

Public safety does not require maintaining the ATF as an independent bureaucracy.

We Call Upon Congress to:

Pass legislation abolishing the ATF as a standalone federal agency.
End appropriations for the agency’s existing administrative and regulatory structure, providing only the temporary transition funding necessary to transfer legitimate operations safely.
Transfer violent-crime, firearms-trafficking, bombing, explosives, and arson investigations to appropriate federal law-enforcement components under clearly defined statutory authority.
Preserve useful forensic laboratories, criminal-tracing capabilities, explosives databases, and training resources while establishing strict privacy, due-process, transparency, and congressional-oversight requirements.
Require Congress to define prohibited firearms, devices, and conduct through legislation, rather than allowing an executive agency to effectively create new criminal prohibitions through interpretation.
Establish clear due-process protections for federally licensed firearm businesses, including written notice of alleged violations, consistent inspection standards, meaningful opportunities to correct noncriminal recordkeeping errors, and a fair appeals process before license revocation.
Direct the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Justice Inspector General to conduct a comprehensive audit of ATF expenditures, enforcement policies, rulemaking, firearms data systems, license-revocation practices, and coordination with other law-enforcement agencies.
Create a firm sunset date for the agency, along with a publicly available transition plan identifying which functions will be transferred, terminated, or returned to Congress for reconsideration.
Review every federal firearms regulation that depends primarily upon agency interpretation, determining whether it is clearly authorized by legislation enacted by Congress.
Ensure that any successor agency focuses on violent criminals and genuine public-safety threats, not constitutionally protected firearm ownership or lawful commerce.
Congress Must Reclaim Its Responsibility

This issue is larger than any particular firearm, accessory, political party, or presidential administration. It concerns the separation of powers, due process, government accountability, and the right of Americans to know what the law requires before the government attempts to punish them.

Public safety and constitutional liberty are not enemies.

We can aggressively prosecute violent criminals while protecting the rights of peaceful, law-abiding Americans. We can investigate arson, bombings, terrorism, and illegal trafficking without giving an administrative bureaucracy effectively unlimited power to reinterpret criminal statutes.

It is time for Congress to reclaim its legislative authority.

It is time to end government by shifting administrative interpretation.

It is time to abolish the ATF as a standalone agency, transfer its legitimate public-safety responsibilities, and restore accountability to federal firearms law.

Sign this petition and demand that Congress abolish the ATF, protect due process, defend the separation of powers, and return lawmaking authority to the elected representatives of the American people.