According to a report that broke on Reuters on November 25, the Department of Justice will launch a new office called the Second Amendment Rights Section, under the Civil Rights Division. The new office will be dedicated to investigating local laws or policies limiting gun rights.
Although the DOJ has not issued any official communication on the new office, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, acknowledged the initiative in a post on X, stating, “Gun rights are civil rights! Can’t wait to get to work on this new initiative.”
The project appears to spring from President Trump’s February Executive Order aimed at the Pam Bondi Justice Department, in which he directed the agency “to assess any ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens, and present a proposed plan of action to the President.”
Although the DOJ has intervened in some Second Amendment cases with pro-2A briefs, such as this case out of New Jersey, it has also taken significant criticism from the gun rights community for not falling in line with the President’s executive order. It has taken numerous pro-gun control stances, as we have documented in our comprehensive tracker.
The criticism of what some have called the “Most Pro-2A AG in US History” has risen to a new level when the DOJ recently ignored the request from 31 members of Congress who jointly wrote Attorney General Bondi, advising the DOJ to take a pro-Second Amendment stance in this case challenging the NFA, which the DOJ declined to do.
News2A, in tracking these actions, has observed that most of the DOJ’s pro-2A measures have been initiated by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.
Although the new initiative is welcomed by the gun owning community (which numbers approximately 100,000,000), if not codified in some way, it could very easily see the same outcome under a new administration as the Biden-Harris Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which was dismantled under the Trump administration.
Interestingly, reports by Reuters, U.S. News & World Report, and Newsmax all stated the same figures with regard to “mass shootings” in their reporting on this story, but none stated the number of defensive gun uses that save lives every year, which, depending on sources used, is estimated to be between 60,000 to 2.5 million times per year. These numbers include cases where the presence of a firearm saved a life without shots being fired. The CDC removed these statistics in 2022.
