The Justice Department has publicly identified nine people granted relief from federal firearm disabilities, but the grants did not come through the department's not-yet-open public application system. An August 27 Federal Register notice, published at 91 FR 55362-55363, records eight grants made May 18 and one made August 5. Those dates matter because DOJ's final rule governing the new application process was published later, on August 20, and does not take effect until September 21.

What the nine grants cover

The notice invokes 18 U.S.C. 925(c), which allows a person prohibited under 18 U.S.C. 922(g) to ask the attorney general to remove a federal firearm disability. The statutory test requires the applicant's circumstances, record, and reputation to satisfy the attorney general that the person is unlikely to act dangerously and that relief would not be contrary to the public interest. According to the notice, the attorney general reviewed the relevant facts and the materials each person submitted while seeking either a pardon or relief from federal firearm disabilities.

The eight people granted relief on May 18 are Patrick Atkinson, Thomas Leon Brooks, Truman James Cox, Dennis L. Haynes, Joshua Ryan Huffman, Dennis William Richardson, Nicholas Robert Sylvester, and Jeffrey Alan Wines. The notice says then Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made those determinations after finding that each person met the public-safety and public-interest tests. It does not identify their underlying prohibitions, describe their records, or give separate reasoning for any one recipient.