New 'FIREARM Act' Mandates 30-Day Fix-It Window for Gun Dealers Before License Revocation

The aptly named Fighting Irrational Regulatory Enforcement to Avert Retailers’ Misfortune Act—or the FIREARM Act—is a major shakeup of how the federal government regulates licensed firearm dealers. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a gun store messes up its paperwork, this bill is the answer, and it leans heavily toward giving the dealer a serious break before shutting them down.

The New Rules of the Road: Fix It or Face It

The biggest change here is the introduction of a mandatory “fix-it” window. Before the Attorney General (meaning the ATF) can start any enforcement action against a licensed dealer for a violation, the dealer must receive “actual notice.” This notice has to spell out exactly what they did wrong and provide all the evidence. Crucially, the dealer then gets 30 business days to correct the violation. If they fix it within that month, the government generally can’t take action against them for that past mistake. This is a huge shift, moving the process from immediate penalty to mandatory compliance help. However, there are limits: violations that are “uncorrectable”—like transferring a gun to someone legally prohibited from owning one—can skip this 30-day grace period because, well, you can’t un-sell a gun to the wrong person.

Protecting the Self-Reported Oopsie

This Act also creates a safe harbor for dealers who catch their own mistakes. If a dealer finds a violation and reports it to the Attorney General before the government inspectors do, it’s called a “self-reported violation.” The government generally cannot revoke or deny a license based on this self-report. In fact, if the issue is correctable, the Attorney General is required to help the dealer fix the problem and provide training to prevent it from happening again. This provision is designed to encourage dealers to be proactive about compliance, but it also means that dealers who are sloppy but honest about their sloppiness get a pass and free training, rather than a fine or immediate penalty.

The High Bar for “Willful” Misconduct

For most people, “willful” means doing something on purpose. This bill tightens that definition dramatically for firearm dealers. Under the FIREARM Act, “willfully” now specifically means conduct that came from deliberate planning or specific intent. This is a much higher bar for the government to clear. They can’t just assume something was willful because the dealer had a messy record or was repeatedly negligent. This means that if a dealer makes a serious mistake, the government would have to prove the dealer intended to break the law, not just that they were careless. For the average person concerned about gun safety, this narrow definition means it’s going to be much harder to penalize dealers for serious, but perhaps accidental, violations.

Courtroom Showdown for Revocations

If the Attorney General still moves to revoke a license, the dealer gets a clear path to federal court. If the dealer files a petition in U.S. District Court within 15 days of the final administrative decision, the license revocation is automatically put on hold until the court rules. Even more significant is the court’s review: they look at the evidence completely fresh (de novo). The court can only uphold the revocation if they find, based on a “preponderance of the evidence,” that the dealer willfully violated the law. This shifts the power away from the specialized enforcement agencies (like the ATF) and puts the final decision in the hands of a generalist federal judge, with the burden of proof squarely on the government.

Fixing Past Grievances

Finally, this bill reaches back in time. It retroactively applies all these new, more lenient rules to anyone whose license was revoked or denied under the “Enhanced Regulatory Enforcement Policy” announced back in June 2021. If you lost your license under that policy, you get a chance to reapply, provided you haven’t been convicted of a prohibiting crime and can prove you’ve fixed the original compliance issues. This means federal agencies will have to reopen and review cases that were previously closed, which could create a significant administrative backlog.