GOA and FFLs Letter Urging House Leadership to Take Action on Pistol Brace Ban

Dear Speaker McCarthy, Majority Leader Scalise, Whip Emmer, Minority Leader Jeffries, and Whip Clark,

We, the undersigned members of the Second Amendment community, urge that Congress reject the arbitrary and tyrannical ban on up to 40 million lawfully owned pistols by the Biden Administration. Congress must not sit on its hands while President Biden and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) actively usurps the lawmaking process to ban millions of firearms.

Prior to the Biden Administration, ATF issued numerous interpretive guidance letters approving pistol braced weapons for manufacture, sale, and possession without additional restrictions, such as federal gun registration and fingerprinting. For nearly a decade, gun stores sold braced pistols and law-abiding gun owners added them to their collections and home defense setups. Despite there being millions of braced pistols in common use around the country, there has been no statistically significant rise in violent crimes committed with these accessories. They do not make a firearm more dangerous.

Firearm stabilizing braces were originally designed to help Americans shoot firearms that they would otherwise be unable to hold or aim. Braces now allow countless Americans with disabilities—or those who lack the body strength—the ability to shoot the best defensive firearms in a controlled manner. This made it infuriating for gun owners to watch Democrats in Congress misrepresenting these devices as excessively dangerous or capable of turning a semiautomatic firearm to fully automatic. The only unique feature of these firearms is cosmetic—a short barrel.

Despite this false narrative perpetuated by anti-gun politicians, Congress does not have the authority to regulate any gun based on its appearance or resemblance to “military” firearms. With the newest Supreme Court decision NYSPRA v. Bruen, the court correctly affirmed that any law related to firearms must be in line with the text and history of the Second Amendment. There was never a law during the founding era that banned firearms on appearances. The Second Amendment provides the federal government a clear mandate: “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

Congress must, therefore, take threefold action to protect the American people against President Biden’s unconstitutional gun ban:

1. H. J. Res. 44 and S. J. Res. 20 must be taken up pursuant to the Congressional Review Act in both the House and Senate, and the ATF rule must be overturned before it goes into effect on June 1^st, 2023.
2. The Stop Harassing Owners of Rifles Today (SHORT) Act must be signed into law, preventing any future administration from weaponizing the draconian National Firearms Act of 1934 against the American people, by eliminating cosmetic regulations on barrel length, and destroying the federal government’s gun registry of short-barreled firearms.
3. The ATF must be defunded and its ability to harass gun owners dismantled. Bureaucrats must be prohibited from enforcing these unconstitutional infringements on the Second Amendment, especially if President Biden will not sign either the Joint Resolution of Disapproval or the SHORT Act.

If Congress fails to take such actions, millions of Americans will be placed at the mercy and discretion of ATF agents’ arbitrary actions. Remember your oaths to the Constitution and the American people.

In Liberty,