The firearms industry urged the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday to back President Donald Trump’s support for the Second Amendment by rooting out the Biden administration’s anti-gun rules and secret deals with liberal gun-banning groups.
In a letter to FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, the industry’s trade group said that reversing former President Joe Biden’s actions would be the first step to matching Trump’s recent pro-gun executive order aimed at restoring historic access to and use of firearms.
“As President Trump recognized, the Second Amendment is ‘foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans,’” wrote Lawrence Keane, National Shooting Sports Foundation senior vice president and general counsel. “I hope that the Commission will take this historic opportunity to contribute to the defense and preservation of American liberty.”
A copy of the letter was provided to Secrets on Tuesday.
Presidential message on National Shooting Sports Month: “… we honor the generations of sportsmen who have carried forward our traditions of marksmanship, responsibility, outdoorsmanship, and freedom.https://t.co/eQivlK3Eyi#letsgoshooting #shootingsportsmonth pic.twitter.com/UXqwyUeAai
— NSSF—The Firearm Industry Trade Association (@NSSF) August 24, 2025
Keane called on the FTC to investigate possibly inappropriate ties between Biden’s team and the anti-gun cabal that has been financed by billionaires such as former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and groups including the Brady Campaign and Giffords Law Center.
He said the results should be made public and forwarded to the Justice Department for prosecution.
In his eight-page letter to Ferguson, Keane pointed to the influence of the gun control “complex” in the Biden administration. It said Biden hired anti-gun advocates from nongovernmental organizations created to ban guns, named a gun control activist as head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and used misleading claims to suggest that the public would be safer unarmed.
NSSF (Keane) Ltr to FTC Chairman Re Giffords Et Al Complaint (08!25!25) by web-producers
“There is a large and well-funded network of Democrat-aligned NGOs who have made it their mission to attack the Second Amendment. During the Biden administration, these groups found eager allies in the White House, which shared the anti-Second Amendment mission. The result was a reciprocal relationship between the Biden administration and this NGO industrial complex,” Keane wrote.
“President Biden openly called the firearm industry ‘the enemy’ and his administration systematically attempted to dismantle it,” Keane added.
He also said the anti-gun groups used their influence and success in getting Biden to decry guns as a key fundraising tool and that the FTC played a critical role in that.
“The objective of these groups is to advance their moneymaking efforts by making sensational claims and enlisting the help of the FTC to harm what they see as the opposing interests of NSSF members,” Keane said.
The letter said the agency played along in the anti-gun campaign to criticize gun company ads and distort the industry’s long record of promoting gun safety and training.
“Perhaps the most dramatic example of the groups’ misleading claims in their ‘complaints’ was the assertion that advertising firearms as useful for self-defense is unfair and deceptive,” the letter noted.
Keane said guns are dangerous, and that’s on purpose.
“That is the fundamental reason that firearms are useful for self-defense and the exercise of Second Amendment rights. If firearms were not capable of being dangerous, they would be as useless as a match that cannot burn or a saw that cannot cut,” he wrote.
President Trump’s Executive Order ends “woke” banking discrimination against lawful firearm businesses. Congress is now working to make it permanent.
Read more: https://t.co/RqF2eNtwLb#NSSF #FairBanking #2A
— NSSF—The Firearm Industry Trade Association (@NSSF) August 22, 2025
Since returning as president, Trump has taken several actions to eliminate Biden’s “whole of government” attack on firearms and the industry, especially moves to ban exports, cut off credit and financing to gun makers, and outlaw weapons commonly used by hunters and target shooters.
SEE THE LATEST POLITICAL NEWS AND BUZZ FROM WASHINGTON SECRETS
His Second Amendment executive order called on the Justice Department to draw up a “plan of action” to pull down anti-gun rules and regulations set up by the Biden team, similar to what he did on Biden’s open-door immigration agenda.
This month, Trump signed another executive order to ban “woke” banks from discriminating against industries and companies that hold political views the bankers don’t agree with, such as gun makers. During the Biden administration, there were reports that banking regulators pressured banks to refuse services to the gun industry.