


The Trump administration’s crackdown on crime in Washington has been propelled, in part, by an aggressive clampdown on guns, with city and federal officials confiscating around 150 weapons since the president declared a crime emergency in the capital nearly three weeks ago.
“I’m pleased to report another 105 arrests have been made and 12 illegal guns taken off the streets of Washington, DC,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on social media on Thursday. It was part of her near-daily tally of gun seizures, an effort spearheaded by Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Under almost any other president, heralding a gun sweep would not be notable. But the shift toward gun enforcement — and publicizing the aggressive street sweeps — marks an abrupt departure for an administration that has courted Second Amendment maximalists and sharply downgraded federal firearms enforcement.
President Trump’s political appointees rolled back Biden-era regulations and diverted officials assigned to weapons cases to immigration raids. The White House has also proposed steep cuts to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and installed disengaged, inexperienced leaders to oversee its increasingly marginalized work force.
While these moves have not exposed major political divisions, they have caused some uneasiness among gun-rights supporters who are concerned that law-and-order officials like Ms. Pirro, who once supported restrictions on assault rifles, will create a chilling effect on legal gun owners in the district and in the surrounding area.
“It sends a message we don’t like,” said Luis Valdes, the Florida director of Gun Owners of America, an influential gun rights group that has pushed for the repeal of most federal gun laws.