Why Trump Is Suddenly So Proud of His Ability to Confiscate Guns

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As federal officials have boasted about their efforts to fight crime in D.C. following the Trump administration’s massive deployment of National Guard troops over the past several weeks, they have all pointed to the same statistic to prove their success: the number of guns recovered by law enforcement. “I am pleased to report another 105 arrests have been made and 12 illegal guns taken off the streets of Washington, DC^[2],” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi tweeted last week, in what has become her near-daily account of police statistics. The White House seems similarly excited to share these gun-recovery statistics. Everyone from D.C.’s mayor^[3] to officials at the FBI seems to agree that recovered guns, along with the number of arrests made, communicates the effectiveness of law enforcement efforts: They must be succeeding if they are taking away the guns and locking people up.

This tough talk on guns is a sudden departure from the administration’s approach to gun regulation in Trump’s second term. Trump has cut funding for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives^[4], shut down the Office of Gun Violence Prevention^[5], issued a plan to slash two-thirds of the inspectors^[6] who monitor federally licensed gun dealers, and directed the FBI to narrow the definition of who is considered a fugitive of justice. Republican state legislatures have passed “right to carry” laws in 29 states^[7], which allow anyone without a serious conviction or an active restraining order to own and carry unregistered guns. Trump himself says he supports a national “right to carry^[8]” law. The pressure to deregulate has been so strong that tough-on-crime U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced in August that carrying a shotgun or rifle^[9] in D.C. without a license would only be charged as a misdemeanor from now on, even though the law allows her to charge it as a felony.

Thanks to these efforts, the act that many citizens of D.C. have been arrested for since the National Guard arrived—possession of a gun without a license—is no longer a crime in much of the country. If Trump and his allies passed a national right-to-carry law, it would be a crime nowhere.

The differences in the “blue” and “red” approach to gun ownership have diverged so drastically that legal penalties can differ even within the same state. In Pennsylvania, it is a misdemeanor to carry a gun without a license. But because of a special law that applies only to “cities of the first class,” it can be charged as a felony^[10] in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s only “city of the first class” and the jurisdiction where I worked as a local prosecutor for six years.

These new “right to carry” laws are not working out well for the states that passed them. They have been linked to significant increases in violent crime^[12], and in particular the escalation of minor conflicts into gunfights^[13]. Such is the cost of Second Amendment absolutism in places like deep-red West Virginia^[14], only hours away from dark-blue D.C., where possessing a gun can still be a serious crime—at least according to Jeanine Pirro and Pam Bondi.

But beyond the hypocrisy, the single-minded focus on gun recovery in D.C. is problematic for another reason. When police efforts are judged by the number of guns recovered, officers become more aggressive, using stereotyping and racial profiling to look for people who may have guns. Car stops and pedestrian stops increase, and some of those stops are pretextual—based on trumped-up suspicion that leads to illegal searches. We are already seeing these kinds of bad stops^[15] in D.C. The more aggressive police become, the more likely it is that these stops end in police violence^[16]. These types of tactics can quickly erode community trust in the police, which is critical to solving other, more serious crimes.

Why, then, is the Trump administration touting the gun arrests in D.C., even though the president himself supports a national “right to carry^[17]” law, and going after guns can lead to such dangerous consequences? Politics. Most Americans favor more gun control^[18], and they aren’t interested in getting into the weeds about which defendants have felony convictions that should keep a gun out of their hands and which just could have been eligible to get a license, but didn’t apply for one. If administration officials just claim that the people arrested with guns in D.C. are would-be criminals, they can have it both ways.

The sort of law enforcement crackdown we are seeing in D.C., which has been described as a dragnet^[23] that lacks strategic planning, is designed to show short-term results with numbers—like guns recovered—that make good headlines. Crime is down in D.C.—of course it is— because there are suddenly many more law enforcement personnel on the streets,^[24] and this, on its own, reduces crime. But that doesn’t mean this effort will produce a reduction in violent crime in the medium or long term. That requires money and planning^[25], offering carrots as well as sticks, and investing in neighborhoods^[26].

When the National Guard pulls out, it will be all too easy to replace the guns that have been confiscated. And thanks to deregulation, those seeking these weapons can also travel across state lines so that lax gun laws in one state can mean easier access in our nation’s capital.

Once again, the president has accomplished an impressive sleight of hand, taking credit for fixing a problem that his policies have only made worse: His administration has worked to deregulate guns, making them easier to buy, and then orchestrated a law enforcement crackdown that claims success by confiscating them. He has convinced many Americans that armed National Guard members are necessary to protect us from the people who carry guns, but only in big cities. And he has achieved all of this as violent crime in our cities continues to decline. We should think twice before applauding the next time that Pirro informs us that another gun has been taken off of the streets.^[27]

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