Multiple news outlets reported in September 2025 that the Justice Department was weighing a ban on gun possession by transgender people, on the theory that they are “mentally ill” and therefore “unstable.” That constitutionally dubious proposal provoked objections from gun rights groups that typically align with the Trump administration, including the National Rifle Association (NRA).
The immediate impetus for the proposal, which harks back to a dark history of attempts to disarm disfavored groups such as Native Americans and black people, was the August 27 shooting that killed two children and injured 21 other people at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. Police identified the perpetrator, who killed herself after attacking the worshipers, as a 23-year-old transgender woman.
CNN reported that “Justice Department leadership is seriously considering whether it can use its rulemaking authority” to “declare that people who are transgender are mentally ill and can lose their Second Amendment rights to possess firearms.” Contrary to the implication, Congress has not given the Justice Department broad authority to disarm people based on psychiatric diagnoses.
Under 18 USC 922(g)(4), it is a felony for someone “who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution” to receive or possess a firearm. Thanks to that provision, Americans who have been subjected to involuntary psychiatric treatment permanently lose their Second Amendment rights, no matter how long ago that happened, whether or not they were ever deemed a threat to others, and regardless of their current psychological state.
While that policy is illogical and unjust, it at least requires a judicial finding or court order. By no stretch can it be construed to cover “mentally ill” people generally. The implications of such a rule would be sweeping, since survey data indicate that half of all Americans qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis at some point in their lives, while a quarter qualify in any given year.
Like Section 922(g)(4), “red flag” laws, which authorize court orders that suspend people’s gun rights when they are deemed a threat to themselves or others, require a judicial determination. Those laws nevertheless raise serious due process concerns, which explains why they have attracted criticism from Second Amendment advocates.
It is therefore not surprising that the NRA took a dim view of the Justice Department discussions, saying it “does not” and “will not” support “sweeping gun bans that arbitrarily strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process.” Under “federal statutes and binding Supreme Court precedent,” the Firearms Policy Coalition warned, “the government cannot impose a categorical ban on an entire class of peaceable people.” The Justice Department’s trial balloon elicited similar complaints from Gun Owners of America, the Second Amendment Foundation, the National Association for Gun Rights, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
Even if Congress approved a transgender gun ban, it is hard to see how it would be “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation”—the Second Amendment test that the Supreme Court established in 2022. Since then, several federal appeals courts have ruled that categorical statutory bans on gun ownership, whether based on illegal drug use or criminal convictions, may be unconstitutional as applied to specific individuals.
In one of those cases, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit held that “nothing in our tradition allows disarmament simply because [someone] belongs to a category of people” that “Congress has categorically deemed dangerous.” Such a ban would be even more constitutionally questionable if it were imposed by bureaucratic fiat.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline “Gun Groups Oppose Trans Firearm Ban.”
