While they might try to claim they support the Second Amendment, I have yet to find an anti-gun group actually oppose an actual piece of gun control legislation. The closest we came was some of them opposing New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s unilateral and unconstitutional ban on the lawful carry of firearms.
And that probably had more to do with how she did it than anything else.
But when the ATF makes up rules out of the blue, those are sacrosanct. They’re inviolable.
That includes the ATF’s recent pistol rule, which three of the biggest anti-gun groups have banded together to file an amicus brief on.
Four of the nation’s top gun control advocates have joined the effort by President Joe Biden’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to regulate, tax, and eventually snuff out one of the most popular firearms in America, the AR pistol.
The groups said today that they filed a third-party brief in support of an appeal to a federal court’s earlier decision to ice a new rule from the ATF that would essentially ban the gun.
The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and March For Our Lives Foundation said they joined to support ATF because they believe that AR-style pistols fitted with “stabilizing braces” are dangerous and have been linked to four mass shootings.
Yvin Shin, with March For Our Lives, said, “Stabilizing braces turn an already deadly weapon into an exponentially more efficient weapon of terror and mass destruction.”
Wait…four mass shootings?
Let’s back up just a bit here and make them play by their own rules. These are people who routinely cite Gun Violence Archive numbers for the total number of mass shootings, which for 2023 is 656 and was 646 for 2022.
It seems to me that if you’re going to cite that many mass shootings on a regular basis, you don’t get to freak out about four of them.
After all, that’s just statistical noise. While each incident was tragic, the truth of the matter is that anti-gunners have been trying to overstate any alleged threat these weapons have.
Then we have the fact that ARs are pretty easy to modify without being a gunsmith. The way they’re build, you can swap out many parts with relative ease. One such part is the stock and buffer tube.
If you take away the pistol braces, what you’ll have are potential mass shooters who will simply throw a stock on an AR anyway. Sure, it’ll be an illegal short-barrel rifle, but since they’re planning mass murder anyway, I’m going to guess they’re not all that worried about the NFA.
This has been talked about before, which is likely why the ATF is targeting the pistols in general.
But on the same token, SBRs are legal if you have the NFA paperwork, which means people can and do buy upper receivers for them lawfully. Just slap one on a lower and you’ve accomplished essentially the same thing, which makes ATF effort to essentially ban AR-pistols less than useless. That’s an even easier swap, truth be told.
At their core, anti-gunners aren’t really alarmed by any specific problems with these pistol braces, AR-pistols in general, or anything of the sort. What they’re bothered by is the idea that we’re a free nation and don’t have to beg permission and offer justification to own firearms.
And that’s the crux of any argument they try to make to the courts.
The good news is that anti-gun rhetoric isn’t what the Court cares about. They want the constitutional arguments for and against, and despite the legal contortionism anti-gun groups engage in to try and justify it, gun control generally lacks constitutionality. Especially when you’re actually trying to wipe out an entire category of firearm.
