It is beyond obvious that the ATF has to be abolished along with repealing the NFA. It is up there with the worst of the alphabet rogue agencies. Moreover, the ATF is charged with overseeing a Constitutional Right – the Second Amendment – which it tramples and infringes on with impunity. The ATF cannot be reformed and reformation shouldn’t be the goal.
A house with poor structural integrity cannot be remodeled. The same goes for the ATF.
“Abolish the ATF Act” introduced by Rep. Eric Burlison and Lauren Boebert has been introduced. We must support this bill.
Documents filed in an ongoing prosecution for illegal possession of a short-barreled rifle are raising new concerns about ATF’s enforcement policy concerning pistols with attached stabilizing braces.
The government’s assertions of authority are truly breathtaking, claiming they can use the terms of an invalid rule to interpret the underlying statute and enforce it against U.S. citizens in felony prosecutions.
We have been reporting on the saga of ATF’s ill-fated 2023 administrative edict, Factoring Criteria for Firearms with Attached “Stabilizing Braces,” ever since the rule was proposed. The final version of that regulation reversed more than a decade of prior statements by ATF that attaching a stabilizing brace to a pistol did not create a short-barreled rifle (SBR) regulated under the National Firearms Act (NFA). Instead, ATF would use a series of vague and open-ended criteria to determine if the braced pistol was intended to be fired from the shoulder. But the rule provided no guidance to owners of such pistols how the criteria would be applied. Instead, ATF essentially claimed, “We’ll know an SBR when we see it.”
By F Riehl, Editor in Chief
