Feds Reopen Rights Restoration After 34-Year Freeze
Feds Reopen Rights Restoration After 34-Year Freeze
The most consequential news in the August 31 Grassroots Legislative Report, penned by Tanya Metaksa for TheGunMag, is a federal one: the Department of Justice has finalized a rule to relaunch the long-dormant process for restoring firearm rights lost under federal law.
A Program Frozen Since the Early ’90s
Relief from federal firearm disabilities has been effectively unavailable for roughly 34 years, according to NRA-ILA, because annual appropriations riders barred ATF from spending money to process restoration applications. That logjam is now breaking.
On Aug. 20, DOJ published a final rule setting application standards for relief under the Gun Control Act, pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 925(c). The rule completes a process that began in February 2025 and moves administration away from ATF to DOJ, under the Attorney General’s statutory authority.
The Rollout Schedule
DOJ is going phased. The invited applicant pool opens Sept. 26, 2026. On Nov. 4, 2026, the department will accept 5,000 applications from the general public. Another 500 will be accepted starting Jan. 4, 2027. Once the system is fully running, the rule anticipates roughly 330,000 applications per year.
DOJ incorporated several NRA-ILA recommendations into the final version, according to the group. Certain technical Gun Control Act violations now trigger presumptive ineligibility for 10 years after sentence completion rather than a permanent bar. Applicants who can’t obtain required records may submit an affidavit explaining their efforts. DOJ may revoke granted relief only by showing the underlying application was fraudulent. And a proposed requirement that applicants notify their local chief law-enforcement officer was dropped.
NRA-ILA still isn’t happy on every front. The group calls the rule overly bureaucratic and warns that DOJ retains substantial discretion over individual applications—discretion a future administration could wield restrictively. It also objects to a requirement that applicants disclose overseas arrests and prosecutions, even where foreign convictions wouldn’t create a federal firearms disability on their own.
One important limit: a successful federal application clears only a federal disability. Anyone under a separate state-law prohibition still has to pursue whatever state restoration process applies.