By admin 
The raffles were posted to Facebook with enticing prizes for winners – PlayStations, NBA tickets and even guns from a local shop.
But the man running the contests, authorities later learned, wasn’t licensed to deal firearms. In fact, he was a convicted felon.
As agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives looked into the contests, the man told them that the owner of the shop providing the guns knew about his criminal record and helped him anyway – an allegation the owner denied.
ATF agents dug into the books for that shop – The Outdoorsman’s Attic, in Sheridan, Colorado – and found that the owner had falsified his records to hide the felon’s role.
Citing those violations and a litany of other problems, the ATF under former President Joe Biden’s administration yanked The Outdoorsman’s Attic’s license two years ago.
Now, under President Donald Trump, it’s back in business.
And it’s not alone.
A CNN investigation found nearly a dozen stores that had their licenses revoked under Biden have now been allowed to sell firearms again under Trump, whose administration has adopted a softer approach to gun regulation – including by ending a Biden-era “zero-tolerance” policy aimed at cracking down on the worst offenders among gun stores. In at least five instances, Trump’s Department of Justice dropped cases where gun shops were challenging Biden-era revocations, allowing the stores to sell guns again.
ATF confirmed that it invited dealers to re-apply for licenses lost under Biden, and granted new ones to at least 23 shops, though it declined to identify the specific firearms sellers.
Some of the businesses that were granted new licenses under the Trump administration were previously flagged for serious violations. Two had received multiple letters warning that at least 25 guns they had sold were found at crime scenes over a one-year period, according to ATF records reviewed by CNN. At least 175 crime guns from those two shops had been recovered from 2021 through 2024, according to those warning letters.
Some former ATF officials said it’s particularly concerning those businesses are now licensed again, because shops that fail to do background checks or that sell to straw buyers fuel a disproportionate percentage of violent crime around the nation.
“We were laser focused on inspecting the gun stores that were the source of crime guns,” said Marianna Mitchem, who was in charge of the inspection division before she left ATF in May 2025. She now works as an adviser for Everytown, a gun violence prevention advocacy group.
She noted that straw buyers and unlicensed dealers are the top means through which traffickers illegally acquire guns, adding, “The bottom line is, ATF isn’t focused on firearms trafficking anymore… and it’s very sad, because our citizens, our communities, are going to pay the price for this.”
ATF chief counsel Robert Leider disputed the idea that ATF has reduced oversight of gun dealers.
“We are taking corrupt dealers very seriously and we are bringing serious charges when we find them,” he told CNN. “We are taking straw buyers very seriously. The difference is that this administration does not see any tension between fighting violent crime and reducing restrictions on law-abiding citizens.”
Leider said for those gun shops that regained licenses yanked under Biden-era policies, “We did both a legal and a factual review. Some of the cases of people who reapplied involve technical violations, but not of the magnitude that gun control advocates have been claiming.”
The Outdoorsman’s Attic declined to comment. Other shops that regained licenses under Trump argued they’d been unfairly targeted by ATF under Biden.
“We were not giving out guns to people that … should not have them or purposely like not running background checks just to get a sale done,” said Will Boswell, the owner of The Tactical Edge, a Tennessee shop that lost its license in 2023 and regained it last fall after reapplying under Trump. “We’ve never done anything like that. We will never do anything like that. But the way that the ATF portrayed that and spoke to us, it made us feel like criminals.”
Since Trump returned to office last year, the White House has significantly cut the number of ATF inspectors and reduced their authority to recommend that dealers’ licenses be revoked for violating federal gun laws, as CNN has reported. ATF has also reduced transparency around its enforcement by removing firearms-license inspection reports and notices of revocations from its website.
Leider said ATF did so because “The reports were being abused by advocacy groups to target specific businesses.”
ATF said it conducted “approximately 8,630” compliance inspections of gun dealers in 2025, and revoked 50 federal firearms licenses – 1,066 fewer inspections and roughly one-fourth as many revoked firearms licenses as in Biden’s last fiscal year in office. It’s unclear how many of those 2025 inspections or revocations took place before Trump took office on January 20.
‘A new era of reform’
In 2021, the Biden administration adopted an “enhanced enforcement” or zero-tolerance policy, which allowed ATF inspectors to recommend dealer licenses be revoked more quickly for serious violations, such as failing to conduct background checks, selling guns to felons, falsifying records, and ignoring law enforcement gun-trace requests.
Even under Biden, gun shops that had their licenses revoked were at times able to continue operating after being granted a new license under a relative or business associate’s name, CNN found.
In August 2024, ATF revoked the license for Southern Maryland Pawn Brokers, according to ATF documents. Instead of fighting the revocation, owner Brett Smith consolidated the business into a second shop and took his name off that license, he said, leaving it in his daughter’s name instead.
“We made some mistakes,” Smith said in an interview, though he also argued that “the Biden people went wacko with their periods and commas; it was all administrative, paperwork problems.”
Still, during Biden’s last year in office, ATF revoked 195 gun dealers’ licenses, the largest number in more than two decades.
Although those revocations amounted to less than a quarter of one percent of the federal licenses held by dealers, pawnshops, gunmakers and importers, some industry critics lashed out. NSSF, a firearms industry trade association, accused the Biden administration of “carrying out a politically driven agenda to drive firearm retailers out of business.”
Within two months of Trump taking office, the zero-tolerance policy was gone and shops that lost licenses under the policy were invited to reapply. At the same time, the DOJ began dropping cases brought by shops challenging revocations.
ATF said it was launching “a new era of reform,” focused on “reducing unnecessary burdens on law-abiding businesses and citizens” and “protecting American communities from violent crime.”
The gun industry celebrated the change, but gun-safety advocates warned that it could lead to more guns getting into the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.
“Crime guns overwhelmingly start in the legal market before they are diverted to the illegal market,” said Josh Scharff, general counsel at the advocacy group Brady: United Against Gun Violence. “We need dealers who follow the law, and dealers who have had their licenses revoked are not that.”
The ATF has not released any information about which specific dealers it has reinstated under its amnesty program.
To identify which dealers are back in business, CNN used an AI tool to analyze and compare federal firearms licenses revoked under Biden with those now licensed under Trump. CNN then independently verified those findings and which of those stores had the same or connected ownership.
CNN also analyzed warning notices known as a “Demand Letter 2,” or DL2 letters, sent under a Biden-era policy to shops with 25 or more guns recovered at crime scenes over the prior year, within three years of when they’d been sold.
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The Trump administration ended that program.
Leider, the ATF general counsel, disputed the significance of the DL2 letters, telling CNN “if you sell enough guns, you’re going to wind up on that list.” He said ATF paused the program “after a campaign by gun-control advocates to target the dealers who were involved.”
Back in business
The Outdoorsman’s Attic ran afoul of the ATF when an inspector found that William Paddock, its owner, repeatedly helped Leonel Castillo, a convicted felon, conduct illegal online gun raffles. The ATF alleged in court documents that Castillo would buy guns from the shop, which would then send them directly to the winners of Castillo’s raffles – effectively helping Castillo deal firearms without a license. An ATF investigator also said that Paddock falsified records to make it appear as though 15 guns Castillo provided for the shop to send to raffle winners had been brought by two other men.
An ATF officer testified in court that Castillo, who’s currently serving a 30-month federal sentence for illegal gun dealing, told him that he had personally shown Paddock videos of illegal gun raffles he was conducting, and had told Paddock he was a felon.
The ATF revoked the gun shop’s federal firearms license in November 2024 after finding 16 violations of federal law.
Paddock fought the revocation order in federal court; and last August, after Trump took office, DOJ dismissed the case and ATF granted the shop a new license.
Paddock declined to comment. In court filings, he argued that Castillo lied to ATF investigators. At the revocation hearing, Paddock testified that he hadn’t known it was illegal to help Castillo raffle weapons as a private individual for profit.
Some other shops now operating again include: Wessel Gun Shop, in Warren, Michigan, which received DL2 letters four years running (meaning at least 100 crime guns were traced to that shop over those four years); and Tampa Tactical Supply in Riverview, Florida, where at least 75 crime guns were traced back over a three-year period.
Posey Guns & Pawn, in Cleveland, Tennessee, had its license revoked in March 2023 after ATF found it knowingly sold a gun to a minor. It also failed to await the results of a background check before selling a gun to a customer who had been involuntarily committed to a mental institution or adjudicated as mentally ill. Its owners also committed 383 violations in filling out gun-transfer forms, ATF found, and falsified records four times, including twice to try to cover up two missing Glock pistols, among other violations. When ATF investigator Kevin Levesque contacted the alleged buyer of the Glocks, the man said he hadn’t bought the guns.
Gun shop owner Terry Posey took the ATF to court, but in August 2023, a federal district court ruled that allowing the gun shop to return to business “has the potential to cause substantial harm to others,” because its violations posed a risk to the public.
In April 2024, another federal district court judge sided with ATF, ruling that the evidence of willfulness in the violations was “so one-sided” that no reasonable jury could find otherwise.
Posey Guns & Pawn is operating again with a new federal firearms license issued to Blake Posey, Terry Posey’s son. Blake Posey declined to comment on ATF’s revocation of his father’s license, saying those issues were not under his ownership.
The Tactical Edge in Tennessee faced a litany of violations as ATF inspected the shop three times in four years.
When the shop appealed its license revocation in 2022, an ATF hearing officer denied it and said a particular concern was the failure to conduct background checks, adding the owners described it as a “mistake” and “human error.”
The owners sued in federal court, but their case was dismissed in December 2023.
By October 2025, though, the owners announced on Facebook that they were back in the business of selling guns with a clip from The Hangover, with Bradley Cooper’s character crowing, “We are back, baby. We are f**king back!”
Boswell, the co-owner, told CNN that he disagreed with the ATF findings and the court ruling. “There is no one who left with a gun who we didn’t perform a background check on,” he said. “I feel like ATF uses their words a lot to hang people up.”
He said the gun shop lost more than $3 million in revenue from being unable to make or sell guns until they got their new license. He said the shop looks for warning signs of straw buyers, but they’re not always easy to spot.
“It sounds like we just handed someone a gun and they walked out the door, and that’s not at all what happened,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for 15 years. We would never risk our entire livelihood over a single gun.”
Some other dealers who lost their licenses under Biden’s zero-tolerance policy argue that they weren’t given proper leeway to fix violations. One Ohio dealer, who asked not to be named, said his license was revoked over what he called “clerical errors” such as incorrectly recording firearm serial numbers. “In all honesty, we made some mistakes,” he said, adding that, “during the Biden administration… they didn’t cut you much slack.”
Since reopening, he said, “We’ve changed how we do things here… Anything that goes in or out of here, we double check and triple check.”
But some advocates pushed back on the idea that federal violations are minor errors.
“Let’s say we forgot something in our taxes, right?” said JaShawn Hill, who runs Chicago Survivors, a group dedicated to addressing gun violence. “We don’t get to say we were overwhelmed by paperwork or due dates or deadlines.”
If you’re a gun shop owner, “You know what you’re responsible for, and I think there’s even a higher level of responsibility because of the lives that can be impacted due to your malpractice.”
Lack of transparency
Under Trump, new ATF leaders say changes at the agency are a needed corrective that help treat gun dealers more fairly without harming the public.
“We did and always will take public safety into account,” said Robert Cekada, the newly confirmed ATF director, at an April 29 news conference. “We believe these rules will not negatively impact public safety.”
Leider, ATF’s chief counsel, said, “We take seriously the need to have proper oversight over dealers … We’re trying to make sure we deploy our resources with a focus on those who are actually engaged in business.”
Some former ATF officials and advocates, though, say that reinstating dealers with records of numerous violations sends a clear message that violating federal rules is tolerated.
“It is very frightening when these stores that have a history of legal violations can so easily reopen and continue irresponsible sales that endanger the public,” said Lindsay Nichols, policy director at Giffords, a gun violence prevention group.
During the first Trump administration, license revocations were lower than under either Obama or Biden, “but they did take some,” said Pam Hicks, former ATF chief counsel. “Every administration takes some, because there are always a handful of people that everyone agrees shouldn’t be in the business.”
Hicks expressed concern about the fact that ATF has stopped making revocation notices public.
Trevon Bosley, a violence-prevention advocate in Southwest Chicago who lost his brother to gun violence, expressed dismay that anyone might portray federal firearm violations as less than severe.
“Their ‘minor’ error … is the difference between me having my brother” or not, he said. “I meet with so many families and so many siblings and so many young people who have lost their families because of these, what they consider ‘minor’ errors.”
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