Politics

America has a gun problem — Donald Trump and Project 2025 could make things worse

Published

2 years ago

November 12, 2024

America has a gun problem — Donald Trump and Project 2025 could make things worse

This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 7 episode of “Velshi.”

If the gun rights lobby has its way, last week’s tragic school shooting in Georgia will be reduced to yet another statistic, dressed up in empty thoughts and prayers. And if Donald Trump returns to office in November, the Republican Party’s unholy alliance with the corporate gun lobby could be cemented into federal law.

If Donald Trump returns to office in November, the GOP’s unholy alliance with the corporate gun lobby could be cemented into federal law.

Both Project 2025 and Trump’s official policy platform, Agenda 47, aim to shield the gun industry with layers of legal protection. While Trump has been trying to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s far-right manifesto for some months now, the proposals in Agenda 47 mirror Project 2025’s dangerous objectives — and in many cases, go even further.

In fact, Trump campaign officials even acknowledged in 2023, before the public caught wind of Project 2025, that it “aligns well” with Trump’s Agenda 47, which is featured on his campaign website and includes multiple links to the Heritage Foundation’s work. Agenda 47 began rolling out in December 2022 and was followed four months later by the Heritage Foundation’s release of Project 2025 in April 2023.

Taken together, Project 2025 and Agenda 47 would grant the gun lobby essentiallyeverythingon its wish list, including making it easier to sell dangerous firearms, weakening concealed carry laws, and overturning state bans on assault weapons.

That’s in spite of the fact that most Americans, including Republicans, support strong gun control laws. A survey from the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans support banning assault weapons, a term used to describe certain semi-automatic weapons including AR-15-style rifles, like the kind used in this week’s shooting in Georgia. Fewer than one-third support allowing expansive gun laws like concealed carry without a permit.

Either way, this has never truly been about protecting Second Amendment rights for ordinary gun owners, despite Republican talking points. It has always been about the GOP’s dangerous alliance with the corporate gun lobby.

That much is reflected in a proposal advanced by the far-right caucus known as the Republican Study Committee, which adopts ideas from both Agenda 47 and Project 2025. That proposal includes the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, the National Rifle Association’s top legislative priority, which would overturn state laws on carrying concealed firearms, and allow guns to be more easily transportable across state lines.

In his Agenda 47 pitch, Trump explicitly states, “I will sign concealed carry reciprocity. Your Second Amendment does not end at the state line.” The law would force each state to recognize the concealed carry standards from every other state — even those states that have dramatically weaker standards and states that don’t require any permitat all.

Gun control advocates describe it as “a race to the bottom for public safety.” According to the group Everytown for Gun Safety, it would be no different than:

“Forcing states to let visitors drive on their highways without a driver’s license and without having passed an eye, written, or road test … [Out-of-state] visitors could be armed without being screened by a background check, and law enforcement would have no permit to evaluate.”

Today’s GOP has repeatedly shown its willingness to sacrifice states’ rights as long as it allows them to impose their extremist agenda.

That’s probably why leading law enforcement groups have opposed the legislation. Gun laws are not a priority for voters or even police departments. Instead, it serves mainly the interests of the corporate gun lobby.

The irony here is that this proposed law blatantly disregards state sovereignty, meaning the party that publicly champions limited federal government and states’ rights is violating its own core principles. From reproductive rights to gun control, today’s GOP has repeatedly shown its willingness to sacrifice states’ rights as long as it allows them to impose their extremist agenda on all Americans.

In fact, right now, the gun industry is working in tandem with Republican lawmakers to overturn all state bans on AR-15-style weapons. While the GOP tries to push this legislation through Congress, gun rights groups are suing to overturn Maryland’s ban on assault-style weapons including the AR-15 type, the weapon of choice in American mass shootings.

The conservative Supreme Court is slated to hear the case this fall, after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld Maryland’s ban, describing the assault-style weapons as “too destructive for self-defense” and best suited for “wreaking death and destruction.” Federal Judge Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee who authored the majority opinion, quoted a trauma surgeon who likened being shot in the liver by an AR-15 to a watermelon exploding on concrete.

But instead of placing blame where it belongs — on the GOP’s financial benefactor, the corporate gun lobby — Agenda 47 cynically diverts attention by targeting a popular GOP scapegoat: the LGBTQ+ community.

In a section addressing school violence, Trump proposes directing the Food and Drug Administration to assemble an “independent outside panel to investigate whether transgender hormone treatments and ideology increase the risk of extreme depression, aggression, and violence. “However, the Gun Violence Archive, which began collecting data on gun violence in 2013, found that the percentage of suspects in mass shootings who are trans is just 0.11%.

The proposals outlined in Project 2025 and Agenda 47 will take a sledgehammer to the already limited gun control measures we have.

Another alarming proposal in Project 2025, which builds on Agenda 47, essentially cripples existing gun control regulations. On page 709, Project 2025 calls for transferring the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the agency responsible for regulating firearms, from the Justice Department to the Treasury Department. This shift would dramatically weaken our nation’s ability to enforce gun laws by making it nearly impossible to track the sale of dangerous firearms, leading to increased gun trafficking and making it more challenging to investigate gun-related crimes.

Lastly, Trump’s Agenda 47 calls for arming teachers with guns and supports sending “federal funding to hire … trained gun owners as armed guards in our nation’s schools.” This is despite a John Hopkins survey showing that less than a quarter, only 23%, of Americans support allowing civilians to carry guns on school grounds. The proposal reflects the GOP’s long-standing policy of shifting the responsibility for public safety from the gun industry to schoolchildren and administrators.

In the absence of any real political will, schoolchildren are left scrambling for bullet-proof backpacks and classroom “panic buttons,” among other Band-Aid solutions. And with classrooms increasingly resembling maximum-security prisons, consider this: Project 2025 refers to abortion access as “the grotesque culture of violence against the child in the womb.”

It seems, though, that once children are out of the womb, the GOP is perfectly content with leaving them to fend for themselves in the face of unchecked gun violence.

The extreme proposals outlined in Project 2025 and Agenda 47 will take a sledgehammer to the already limited gun control measures we have, leaving us scrambling for ever-more inadequate defenses against the uniquely American public health crisis of gun violence.

This post is part of “Inside Project 2025,” an ongoing series on BLN’s “Velshi.” Each week, host Ali Velshi explores some of the most outrageous proposals from the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for a second Trump presidency and explains how they could impact you. Read how Project 2025 would affect your family, presidential power and the Department of Justice.

Politics

The clock is ticking on an Iran talks. Here’s what still has to get done.

Published

2 hours ago

June 19, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

As talks loom between the U.S. and Iran, negotiators face a simple and daunting task: turning a 14-point memorandum of understanding into a comprehensive nuclear deal within 60 days.

The ticking clock was set in motion on Thursday, according to Vice President JD Vance, following the signing of the MOU one day earlier. That signing brought an official end to military hostilities. What it did not do is resolve the conflict that caused them.

Some agreements took effect immediately upon signing: a cessation of hostilities, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the lifting of the U.S. naval blockade, the issuing of oil waivers and initial steps to unfreeze billions of dollars in Iranian assets.

But those were the easy parts.

What remains are the metaphorical landmines — the unresolved questions the MOU largely deferred rather than decided, each with the potential to blow up any prospect for a nuclear deal. On Thursday evening, the White House announced that Vice President JD Vance will not attend talks in Switzerland that had been planned for Friday — a decision that may well be read as a signal of just how far apart the two sides are. A White House spokesperson acknowledged in a statement that while the U.S. delegation has been prepared to depart at the first available opportunity, “the logistics of these negotiations have never been simple or predictable.”

Here is what the negotiators will actually have to solve:

The future of the Strait of Hormuz

The MOU ensures safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz “with no charge for 60 days only,” and outsources the negotiating responsibility for ensuring long-term toll-free passage to Gulf allies — ceding responsibility for a key outstanding issue.

“We don’t ever want this to happen again — that’s not about tolling, that’s about ensuring that the Straits are never used as a choke point for the global economy ever again,” Vance said at the White House on Thursday. “If that’s not reflected in the final deal, there’s not going to be a final deal.”

Recognizing the Iranians will “assert their rights as aggressively as they can,” a senior U.S. official was confident Gulf states would preserve their own self-interests and press Iran to allow toll-free passage.

There’s also the matter of demining the waterway. Iran has 30 days for “removing the technical and military obstacles and demining,” but mine removal could take weeks or even months — potentially testing U.S. patience if ship traffic doesn’t recover quickly.

In a joint statement following this week’s G7 summit in France, leaders said a defensive initiative led by France and the UK could help by “protecting merchant vessels, reassuring commercial shipping operators, and supporting verification that all mines are removed.”

Sanctions and frozen assets

Senior U.S. officials have said sanctions relief for Iran would be tied to its performance — but haven’t yet indicated what those benchmarks will be.

“As they dial up their good behavior, we can dial up the economic relief,” Vance said in broad terms on Thursday at the White House. “If they dial down their good behavior, we can turn it off.”

The MOU commits the U.S. to ending all Iranian sanctions — including those imposed by the U.N. Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency — “in an agreed-upon schedule as part of the final deal.” How quickly the U.S. is willing to provide this economic relief could become a sticking point.

Complicating matters further: whether lifting of sanctions would require congressional action, and how the State Department’s designation of Iran as a State Sponsor of Terrorism factors in.

Then there’s the unfreezing of billions of dollars of Iranian assets. Though the Trump administration insists any release would be tied to Iran’s performance, the MOU’s own text undercuts that: Paragraph 13 says the process of releasing assets must begin before negotiations even start, handing Iran an upfront incentive rather than one to earn.

“It’s clearly a huge loophole and a potential for disagreement,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East advisor and negotiator for the State Department, calling the text’s language “destructive ambiguity.”

The Lebanon front

The MOU calls for “the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon.”

“We expect Hezbollah is not going to be firing rockets and firing drones at the Israelis, and we also expect that the Israelis are not going to be going wild in Lebanon, right? Both sides have to honor their end of the deal,” Vance said at the White House on Thursday.

Yet Israel did not sign the aforementioned “deal.”

Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter said it’s “unnecessary” for Lebanon to have been included in an agreement between the U.S. and Iran, pouring cold water on the idea that Israel would cease its offensive against Hezbollah and occupation of southern Lebanon — even if Iran says that’s a dealbreaker for negotiations.

“This is something that we simply can’t live with,” Leiter told NPR on Tuesday. “We can’t have jihadi terrorists on our border. … We’re not going to withdraw from South Lebanon, and the mad men of Tehran have no business poking their nose into Lebanon.”

A U.S. official confirmed that U.S.-brokered peace talks between Israel and Lebanon will continue as planned next week at the State Department. Whether the Lebanon provision holds will depend on Iran keeping Hezbollah in check and Trump keeping Netanyahu in line.

Iran’s reconstruction

The MOU promises that within 60 days, the U.S. would work “with regional partners” to develop a plan guaranteeing at least $300 billion for Iran’s “reconstruction and economic development.”

Trump has insisted that there “is no 300 Billion Dollar payment to Iran by the U.S.” using taxpayer money. That may technically be true, but the U.S. has still committed to delivering that sum in the form of investment. That means convincing private corporations and Gulf allies — many of which are dealing with economic disruption and rebuilding costs after facing strikes from Iran — to invest in a country the Trump administration is still threatening to attack again if Iran reneges on its end of the deal.

Vance said there is a “great desire from the Arab world and from outside the Arab world to actually get involved in Iran if they behave properly.” Pressed by MS NOW whether private money would be included, Vance said he assumes countries like the United Arab Emirates would be part of the picture.

But Gulf leaders expressed concern to MS NOW about the agreement’s financial provisions that could strengthen Iran economically at a time when many Gulf states believe pressure should have been maintained.

Iran’s highly enriched uranium and nuclear program

For the duration of negotiations, Iran will “maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program,” per the MOU. What happens after that is the central outstanding question — the one that led to war in the first place.

The MOU provides no consensus on what to do with Iran’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium, only an agreement to “resolve” the matter. It doesn’t distinguish between the roughly 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium — material close to bomb-grade — and the 11 tons enriched to various levels above the 3.67% threshold set by the JCPOA, which Trump withdrew from during his first term.

A senior U.S. official said downblending the stockpile would be the minimum standard, with Washington pushing for “more than that” during negotiations. Vance alluded to “gentlemen’s agreements,” noting that Iran has “promised that they would allow inspectors in to destroy that highly enriched stockpile, and then, of course, it’s not usable anymore, you take it somewhere else.” Iran has not formally agreed to anything beyond a general promise to resolve the issue.

Whether Iran will be permitted to enrich in the future, and to what extent, remains an open question. The MOU commits the two countries to discussing “the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters,” promising a “satisfactory framework” related to Iran’s “nuclear needs” in a final deal.

Notably, the U.S. has already backed down from one of its previous red lines, dropping Trump’s earlier demand for zero enrichment forever in favor of allowing Iran to maintain a civilian nuclear program.

“We’re not bothered at all by the idea of civilian power plants in Iran,” a senior U.S. official said. “What we’re bothered by is the type of infrastructure that would allow them to jump from civilian power generation to nuclear weapons development. … We feel quite confident that if they meet their obligations under this agreement, they’re not going to have that infrastructure to build a nuclear weapon.”

A senior administration official insisted Iran has committed to dismantling its nuclear weapons program, including its nuclear site, noting that the countries would “figure out how to do that in the technical negotiations that will follow.” But abandoning its nuclear program will be a tough domestic sell for the Islamic Republic to make.

Inspections and implementation

Trump has repeatedly hammered the Obama-era JCPOA for not having a strong enough verification and inspections system. But his own MOU offers little clarity on what will replace it, only a vague commitment that “an executive mechanism will be established to monitor the successful implementation of this MOU and the future compliance of the final deal.”

Given that Iran blocked IAEA inspectors from accessing its nuclear facilities under the JCPOA, a stronger inspection system represents perhaps the most important potential U.S. win in final deal talks — if Washington can secure one.

“If we feel comfortable with the inspection and enforcement regime, that is when they will get some of the benefits of negotiation,” a senior administration official told reporters last week, without providing specifics of what that verification regime would entail nor confirming the role of the UN or IAEA.

Miller, the former State Department negotiator, compared the MOU to Trump’s 20-point Gaza plan — a document that pushed the conflict out of the headlines but left unsolved problems on the humanitarian, disarmament and reconstruction fronts.

“I see very little chance, without significant flexibility on the part of both sides, that 60 days is going to be enough” to bridge the “Grand Canyon-like gaps that separate Tehran and Washington,” Miller said.

And though the MOU’s 60-day deadline allows for extension “with mutual consent,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the military is “prepared to restart if we need to” if Iran does not show progress in complying with U.S. demands.

Trump, speaking at the G7, was blunter still.

“If it doesn’t get done in 60 days, that’s all right,” Trump said. “We go back to bombing.”