For the past 30 years, Republican lawmakers have dutifully filed the same bill to let people carry concealed guns in all 50 states, regardless of each state’s permitting standards. Sometimes they submitted the same bill twice in one session.
Lawmakers have tried to loosen other laws, including the National Firearms Act of 1934, which restricts machine guns and silencers. They have also made several attempts to restructure the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — or abolish it altogether.
Before now, removing silencers from federal regulation or abolishing the ATF were ideas largely limited to the fringes of the gun rights movement. Some of these bills passed the House in previous sessions only to stall in the Senate. But with a Republican trifecta in Washington, these long-held goals suddenly seem within reach.
“A key test will be if Republicans can get any of these bills to the floor of the House and get the majority vote behind them,” said Robert J. Spitzer, a political scientist and professor emeritus at the State University of New York at Cortland. “Because if they pass the House, it’ll put more pressure on the Senate.”
So far in 2025, House and Senate Republicans have introduced at least 26 bills aimed at loosening federal gun laws, according to an analysis by The Trace. Three bills in the House seek to reform the ATF, while two bills call for its elimination — legislation that’s been introduced four times before. Three bills in the House and two bills in the Senate seek to remove silencers from the National Firearms Act. One House bill seeks to repeal the National Firearms Act altogether.
The gun rights movement’s signature agenda item, national concealed carry reciprocity, has been introduced in both the House and Senate — for the 16th consecutive time. The policy, which the National Rifle Association has likened to a driver’s license for guns, is opposed by states with strong gun laws, which don’t want guns carried by residents of states that employ lower permitting standards or don’t require training.
National concealed carry reciprocity “would be the absolute prize” for Republicans, “and they’re going to do everything they can to get that,” said Josh Horwitz, co-director of Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, who spent decades lobbying for gun reform on the Hill.
Horwitz and other experts tell The Trace that Republicans are better positioned than ever to get their wish list codified into law. But their razor-thin majority in the House — currently 218 to 215 — and the filibuster in the Senate still stand in their way.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has pledged to keep the filibuster, which sets the bar at 60 votes for bills to pass the chamber. But President Donald Trump, who wanted Senate Republicans to scrap the filibuster in his first term, might make the same demand again. As it stands, even with a three-seat majority, Republicans don’t have the votes to overcome a filibuster over policies like concealed carry reciprocity.
But there are other ways for Republicans to get pro-gun priorities across the finish line. Experts we spoke to said they could see Democrats making a deal on a lower-stakes bill, like silencer deregulation, if Republicans are holding up something they really want, like public health funding. Silencers don’t show up in crimes very often — though they used to before they were federally regulated — and homemade versions are proliferating, making the government less instrumental in controlling their flow. “I do think it’s a long shot, but it’s certainly possible,” Spitzer said of a quid-pro-quo.
On The Reload podcast in January, the sponsor of the House’s concealed carry reciprocity bill, GOP Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina, expressed cautious optimism about passing the measure. “I think the Second Amendment’s pretty clear: There shouldn’t be restrictions on it. But I’m also dealing with the art of the possible,” he said.“One big concern even from conservatives on this is, ‘Are you going to trample on states’ rights?’”
Some bills introduced this term are new to Congress but have been adopted by red states in recent years. One such bill aims to address “discrimination” against the gun industry by barring the federal government from entering into contracts with businesses that refuse to work with gun companies.
After the 2018 Parkland school shooting, rental car agencies, airlines, and other companies ended partnerships with the National Rifle Association, and Bank of America announced plans to stop lending to manufacturers of assault weapons (though it later softened that policy). A number of red states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Montana, Texas, Utah — have passed measures to penalize such companies.
Other congressional GOP bills attempt to reverse new and novel policies pushed by gun reformers in recent years. One such measure would ban credit card companies from assigning merchant category codes to firearms retailers. Credit cards have employed the codes for decades to categorize many types of businesses, from bakeries to boat dealers. Experts say using a code for gun sellers could make it easier for credit card companies to flag people making large gun and ammunition purchases and alert law enforcement. (Gun hoarding has preceded several mass shootings.)
Several pieces of legislation seek to relax regulations on gun sellers, some of whom have complained of overzealous enforcement during the Biden administration. One bill would release gun dealers from a requirement to turn over transaction records to the ATF when they go out of business. If passed, the bill would make it harder for the ATF to trace the purchase history of guns used in crimes, potentially stymieing shooting investigations.
It seems unlikely that Republicans will “start a fight over guns when they need a tax deal in reconciliation, they’ve got to fund the government, get a budget, and raise the debt ceiling,” said Horwitz, of Johns Hopkins. Look for movement next year, possibly in the summer when legislators are in a rush to go on break so they can campaign ahead of the 2026 midterms, he said.
There are things Republicans can do through the budget reconciliation process to circumvent the Senate filibuster and pass a bill with a simple majority, researchers told us. Reconciliation can be used for legislation that affects spending and revenues. For example, Republicans who can’t get traction on a bill to abolish the ATF could budget $0 for the agency.
The GOP could also “neuter” the ATF by refusing to confirm a full-time director and reducing oversight of rogue gun dealers, said Spitzer, the SUNY Cortland professor. In 2021, President Biden ordered the ATF to implement a zero-tolerance policy toward gun dealers who willfully sell to prohibited purchasers or fail to conduct background checks. It’s widely expected that Trump will pull back on that.
For their part, congressional Democrats each year usually file dozens of gun reform bills pushing longstanding priorities like universal background checks. So far this session they have filed 12. These bills would, among other things, raise the minimum age to buy semiautomatic rifles, require a permit to purchase a handgun, establish a permanent federal Office of Gun Violence Prevention, and offer tax credits for buying a gun safe. There’s also a bill that would direct the ATF to publish a report on gun trafficking — something ordered by the Biden administration but unlikely to be continued under Trump.
Lindsay Nichols, policy director at the gun reform group Giffords, said she expects Democrats to file more gun reform bills later in the session and to keep filing bills year after year until they pass — just like Republicans do.
“I do think that we will reach a tipping point where the public outcry about gun violence and our weakened laws will reach Republican ears,” Nichols said. “And at some point we will see Republicans start to take the issue seriously and consider real solutions.”
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