The gun community was inflamed by the ATF‘s recent notice, “Objective Factors for Classifying Weapons with ‘Stabilizing Braces.’” Matt Larosiere provides a thoughtful, levelheaded analysis of the document in this video. (I encourage you to subscribe to his channel to keep up with his excellent gun policy content.)
There’s an additional point I would like to add to the conversation. In our attempts to parse what exactly the ATF’s actions will mean for gun owners, let’s not lose sight of what the ATF has revealed itself to be.
Consider the following excerpt from the notice:
“Until that (registration, disposal, or surrender) process is separately implemented, and absent a substantial public safety concern [emphasis added], ATF will exercise its enforcement discretion not to enforce the registration provisions of the NFA against any person who, before publication of this notice, in good faith acquired, transferred, made, manufactured, or possessed an affected stabilizer-equipped firearms.”
The emphasized text contains a tacit but important admission: the ATF itself has acknowledged that the firearms it’s targeting do not inherently constitute any sort of substantial public safety concern. Gun owners already know this, of course — but it’s fascinating that the ATF is not even attempting to maintain a pretext of public safety justification for its pistol brace crusade.
In fact, the ATF’s recent notice makes no other reference at all to public safety, fighting crime, or curbing violence, except one vague allusion to the notion that “the purpose of the NFA is ‘to regulate certain weapons likely to be used for criminal purposes.’” And, of course, that’s complete and utter nonsense. The NFA has almost nothing to do with handguns (the guns that are actually most likely to be used for criminal purposes).
The ATF has spent years telling gun owners that shoestrings are machine guns, that legal guns may become illegal guns depending on how you hold them, that vague or secret criteria may be used to deem your guns illegal, and that things that aren’t guns are guns, to say nothing of countless other dubious decisions and the perpetuation of some horrific tragedies. Thus, gun owners are likely to see the ATF as abusive and more interested in harassing them than as an agency truly dedicated to protecting public safety.
The ATF is doing everything it can to maintain that reputation.
