Not Surprised

And I told you so.

Here.

Recent reminder here.

Your AR "pistol" with a stabilizing brace always has been a short barreled rifle by the legal definition of such things.

The term “short-barreled rifle” means a rifle having one or more barrels less than sixteen inches in length and any weapon made from a rifle (whether by alteration, modification, or otherwise) if such weapon, as modified, has an overall length of less than twenty-six inches.

But a "handgun" is simply:

(30) The term “handgun” means—

(A)

a firearm which has a short stock and is designed to be held and fired by the use of a single hand; and

(B)

any combination of parts from which a firearm described in subparagraph (A) can be assembled.

 

Designed...

 

Modification...

When we're complaining about the ATF making shit up whole cloth, I think we need to look in the mirror too.

Especially when we're touting "history, text and tradition!"

Under the NFA definitions these "pistols" should have been rifles because what they meant at the time of passage was an alteration of a design, not just an alteration of something made as a rifle.

ATF rolled with pistols made with rifle actions are pistols because that gave them greater power over armor piercing ammunition.

When the SB15 came out, ATF made shit up to allow it, and we rolled with it because it was in our favor.

Now that they are reversing that, we're butt hurt?

Pick a lane.

If they can't make shit up, then they can't do it at all.  Not just when their making shit up disfavors us.

The bitter pill is if we remove all the made up shit, there's no such thing as an AR pistol.  There's just SBR.

And whomever is shoving this shit around is getting us to waste political capital fighting it.

Want this to stop mattering, get on your congress creatures to nuke the NFA, or at least the short barrel rifle provisions.

Accept and incremental approach to dismantling the NFA rather than demanding the nothing that always accompanies "all or nothing" approaches to this.

Point out that the SBR, SBS and AOW provisions of the NFA were written with the idea that handguns would be banned outright and were intended to keep people from making defacto handguns from the remaining kinds of firearms.

Point out that there's a shit load of defacto SBR's out there not causing any problems and use that as the wedge to get them legalized.

This is not an easy fight.

 

It's also not a fight we're picking.  Yet.

 

Post Bruen, things are looking good on getting some of this nuked off, if not all of it.