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ATF authorized the first pistol brace products almost ten years ago. These products provide an attachment to pistols that distributes weight of the pistol to the forearm and were designed to help disabled persons control and safely shoot brace-equipped pistols.
Guidance regarding the legality of braces and their features has been issued by ATF over the last 10 years. This guidance seemed to attempt to balance the needs of disabled persons with ATF’s desire to prevent the brace from being used as a stock, which in ATF’s view makes the braced device a rifle subject to the National Firearms Act, including its rules on transfer, the imposition of a $200 transfer tax, and restrictions on transport and possession.
These proposed rules utterly disrupt this balance and fly in the face of the purpose for which the brace was designed and sold. The proposed rules are highly restrictive and would cause the vast majority of the millions of braced pistols in the hands of US citizens to be reclassified as NFA items. This reclassification would impose incredible costs on US citizens who have purchased braces and braced products in the last ten years and significantly limit the future availability of these devices to the disabled community.
Worse is that the rule’s point criteria used to evaluate braced pistols to determine if they are pistols or NFA items penalize firearms with features that are useful to the disabled and have nothing to do with whether the brace acts as a stock. Examples include restrictions on the minimum and maximum weights of braced firearms, and brace adjustability and attachment methods. Moreover, ATF ignores the benefits of features that are clearly beneficial to the disabled community, and instead based on unsupported conjecture proposes rules that these features (such as adjustability) define the brace as a stock, denying beneficial features and making the device less effective or unavailable to the disabled community.
ATF is prohibited from making such discriminatory rules under The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Section 504 states that “no… individual with a disability… shall be excluded from, denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any activity that… is conducted by any Executive agency.” Here ATF’s rulemaking discriminates against disabled persons by arbitrarily limiting design characteristics that enhance the effectiveness of the brace design for the disabled person and for no discernible purpose.
The balance that previously existed in ATF’s pistol brace guidance and rulemaking has been lost. We urge ATF to reconsider the proposed rule in order to make appropriate accommodations for the disabled, as originally intended and required by statute.
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发表于 2021-9-7 18:46
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