The Federalist Nearly all Senate Republicans banded together to condemn President Joe Biden for his administration’s recent gun law proposal which seeks to reclassify pistol braces as short-barrel rifles, The Reload reports.
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, all of the Republicans in the Senate, except for Rob Portman of Ohio and Susan Collins of Maine, demand that the Biden administration “correct the mistake” and walk back the proposal which the legislators allege was justified on claims ”without evidence” that people simply wanted to avoid paying for NFA items.
“The way the proposed rule is written makes clear that ATF intends to bring the most common uses of the most widely possessed stabilizing braces within the purview of the NFA,” the senators wrote. “Doing so would turn millions of law-abiding Americans into criminals overnight, and would constitute the largest executive branch-imposed gun registration and confiscation scheme in American history.”
As noted in the letter, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives previously approved the use of pistol braces and even broadened their use under the Trump administration but is now “suddenly chang[ing] course.” Not only do the senators say that the proposal, if passed as a rule, will “yank the rug out from under those law-abiding Americans,” but the proposal’s “vague and confusing criteria” will also cause problems for anyone who already owns a pistol brace and tried to get it reclassified through a slow, bureaucratic process.
“This is plain wrong. The proposed rule is worse than merely abdicating your responsibility to protect Americans from criminals; you’re threatening to turn law-abiding Americans into criminals by imposing the largest executive branch-initiated gun registration and confiscation program in American history,” the letter concludes. “We urge you to turn back.”
The letter comes just one day after Biden re-upped his pledge to take away guns and then justify his newest gun control by claiming that Americans don’t have the weapons they would need to “take on the government” anyway.
“No one needs to have a weapon that can fire over 30, 40, 50, even up to 100 rounds, unless you think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests or something,” Biden said.
This response from the White House under the guise of addressing the national crime surge, the GOP letter states, is merely empowering the “ATF and the Department of Justice [sic] to go after law-abiding gun owners who are minding their own business and using equipment that ATF seemingly blessed in 2017.”
