(RepublicanNews.org) – Spearheaded by members of the Republican House Freedom Caucus, legislators are hoping to reverse a January decision by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that criminalized owners of firearms with “stabilizing braces” attached to them. In a statement released this week, the President’s cabinet leveled the threat of a presidential veto at the members of the House.
The White House statement notes that stabilizing braces were used in recent mass shootings, referencing the tragedies in Dayton, Ohio, and Boulder, Colorado. The statement does not include the fact that standard rifle stocks could easily have been added to the guns being referenced, or to any so-called AR-style pistol. Such inconsistencies are seen by gun rights supporters as evidence of the arbitrary nature of such regulations.
At the beginning of 2023, Attorney General Merrick Garland moved to reclassify pistols with stabilizing braces as short-barreled rifles, or SBRs. Millions of legal gun owners were then given 120 days to remove the braces from their weapons or register the guns with the ATF. While the ATF says that about 250,000 of the braces have been registered, some estimates put the number of braces within the American population as high as 10 million. Pistol braces have been available to consumers without national regulation since 2012.
Ben Cline, a Virginia Congressman, pointed out that the ATF’s January designation “didn’t occur because of a law that Congress passed.” Rather, he said, it came from an “electorally unaccountable bureaucrat” and would turn citizens into criminals “with the stroke of a pen.”
Proponents of the ATF’s regulation, including the Biden administration, point out that stabilizing braces can allow pistols to be fired from the shoulder. The short nature of a pistol with the brace attachment, they say, allows it to be wielded with ease and fired more accurately “to inflict mass carnage.”
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