Joe Biden couldn’t get universal background checks through Congress.
So his ATF tried to sneak them in through a regulatory rule — and a federal judge just shut the whole thing down again.
And the ruling landed with a line that has gun owners cheering from coast to coast.
What the ATF Tried to Pull Off
The “Definition of ‘Engaged in the Business’ as a Dealer in Firearms” rule was issued in April 2024, potentially making any private sale of firearms for a profit illegal.
That’s not a minor regulatory tweak. That’s the kind of rule that turns ordinary Americans — people who sell a hunting rifle at a gun show, or flip a pistol they no longer need — into federal criminals overnight if they don’t hold a Federal Firearms License.
Under former President Joe Biden, the ATF issued the rule in April 2024 that dramatically expanded who needs a federal firearms license to sell guns, relying on language in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022, which amended the Gun Control Act’s definition of being “engaged in the business” of dealing in firearms.
Gun rights groups saw it for what it was from the start.
Gun Owners of America, the State of Texas, and several other states and organizations sued in Texas v. ATF.
In June 2024, Judge Kacsmaryk issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the rule against the plaintiffs. After the Department of Justice later voluntarily dismissed its appeal of that injunction in April 2026, the court entered final judgment on June 12, 2026, vacating the rule in its entirety under the Administrative Procedure Act.
You’d think that would be the end of it. It wasn’t.
Rather than accept the ruling, the ATF and DOJ filed a motion asking the judge to modify the vacatur. They argued that only pieces of the rule should fall, not the whole thing — a legal maneuver that the judge wasn’t buying for a second.
The Judge Didn’t Mince Words
United States District Judge Matthew J Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas, a Trump appointee, ruled that the injunction blocking the Biden administration’s “Engaged in the Business” rule would remain in place.
In the ruling, Kacsmaryk chided the Justice Department for being “too clever by half” and that the rule was a means of imposing so-called “universal background checks,” which have been unable to pass Congress.
That last part is the whole ballgame. Congress has tried to pass universal background check legislation repeatedly and failed. The American people, through their elected representatives, said no. Biden’s ATF decided that didn’t matter and wrote a rule to accomplish the same end through bureaucratic sleight of hand.
Kacsmaryk wasn’t having it.
“The Court’s 2024 and 2026 Orders were clear: ATF violated the [Administrative Procedures Act] when it promulgated the Engaged in the Business Rule, so the rule cannot stand,” Kacsmaryk wrote. “Defendants cannot avoid the force of those Orders by rearranging a few words between the old Rule and the new one.”
That sentence deserves to be read twice. The ATF’s legal team went back to the judge with what amounted to a lightly reworded version of the same rule it had already been told was illegal — and called it a new rule. The judge called that exactly what it was.
And Gun Owners of America wasted no time celebrating. The organization noted that Judge Kacsmaryk denied the Justice Department’s request to un-vacate Biden’s Engaged in the Business Rule, and that the judge also slammed the ATF’s new rule, proposed in April, which “doubles down on the substance of the old [Biden] Rule.”
The Bigger Picture Behind the Blanche Announcement
This ruling doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The Trump administration has been actively working to dismantle the gun control infrastructure Biden spent four years building through regulatory action.
Attorney General Todd Blanche revealed during an April 30 press conference that at least 34 rule changes would be published by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, including a repeal of the “stabilizing brace” rule imposed by the Biden administration, as well as altering two other regulations that the Biden administration used to enact gun control, one of which targeted so-called “bump stocks,” and the other was known as the “Definition of ‘Engaged in the Business’ as a Dealer in Firearms” rule.
Thirty-four rule changes. That’s how much regulatory baggage Biden’s ATF piled onto law-abiding gun owners over four years.
The stabilizing brace rule alone turned potentially millions of Americans into felons overnight when it was issued. The “Engaged in the Business” rule was the same playbook — use the regulatory pen to accomplish what the legislative process refused to deliver.
Courts have been pushing back on this approach for two years. The pattern is consistent: Biden’s ATF would issue a sweeping rule, gun rights groups would sue, and judges would find that the agency had exceeded its authority. The ATF kept trying anyway.
What makes the latest Kacsmaryk ruling particularly significant is that the DOJ under the current administration still went to court to defend a Biden-era rule — and lost. That tells you something about how deeply these regulatory positions were embedded inside the agency, even after a change in administration.
The underlying argument the ATF made throughout this litigation was essentially that Congress expanded the definition of “engaged in the business” in the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, and the ATF was just implementing that expansion. The crux of the opposing groups’ argument was that the ATF overstepped its regulatory mandate and attempted not just to interpret and enforce the law, but to make it, which is a job for Congress.
Kacsmaryk agreed with that argument in 2024. He agreed with it again in June 2026. And he agreed with it again in August 2026 when the DOJ came back with a slightly different version of the same position.
At some point, losing three times in the same court on the same rule has to register somewhere inside the Justice Department.
But here’s the thing — the ATF also proposed a new rule in April 2026 that, according to the judge, “doubles down on the substance of the old [Biden] Rule.” So even as the courts were striking down the original regulation, the agency was already drafting a replacement that attempted to preserve its core provisions. That’s not regulatory compliance. That’s regulatory defiance dressed up in new paperwork.
The Second Amendment doesn’t have an asterisk that says “except when the ATF decides otherwise.” Law-abiding Americans who buy, sell, or trade firearms shouldn’t have to worry that a federal agency has quietly redefined their ordinary conduct as a federal crime. That’s exactly what the “Engaged in the Business” rule attempted to do, and it’s exactly what Kacsmaryk has now blocked — repeatedly.
The ruling is a win for every American who believes the Second Amendment means what it says. And it’s a reminder that the courts remain one of the few reliable places where regulatory overreach actually gets stopped.
Sources: Daily Caller; Daily Caller News Foundation; Ammoland; News2A