Paul Teller
Executive Director
As President Biden and progressives in Congress continue to chip away at the Constitution, our circle of freedoms grows smaller by the day. Today, Senate Democrats blocked an effort to overturn the Biden administration’s unconstitutional pistol brace rule.
Pistol braces were designed to help disabled veterans fire pistols safely. Under the ATF’s rule, pistols with a stabilizing brace attachment would be reclassified as short-barreled rifles, and gun owners who fail to destroy or register their weapons with the ATF (at a fee of $200) could face 10 years in jail and ridiculous fines of up to $10,000. The new rule is an about-face from the policy enacted when Joe Biden was Vice President, which declared that attachments do not change the classification of a pistol.
The pistol brace rule is an egregious violation of constitutional rights, and it’s just the latest example of the Left’s war on the Second Amendment. Biden has previously called for a ban on popular hunting rifles and high-capacity magazines, and taken steps to mandate background checks on all gun sales. Liberals in the private sector are rallying to the left’s cause, with credit card companies colluding with liberal politicians to track, monitor, shame – and eventually shut down – legal gun store purchases.
Conservatives in the House did their part, passing a Congressional Review Act resolution, with over 180 cosponsors, to block the pistol brace rule before it goes into effect. With that effort smashed in the Senate, the battle moves on to the courts, where conservatives should have high hopes of defeating the rule once and for all. This year, two federal courts have already reined in another case of anti-Second Amendment executive overreach, striking down President Donald Trump’s ill-advised nationwide ban on bump stocks. Like Biden, Trump decreed his gun control measure through executive fiat, not the legislative process.
As Trump’s bump stock ban and Biden’s pistol brace rule show, bad things happen when Congress abdicates its role as the federal government’s sole legislative authority. And when the issue is Americans’ right to keep and bear arms, the outcome could be deadly for law abiding families – especially in the midst of a sharp increase in violent crime that has occurred in the wake of the left’s Black Lives Matters riots and Defund the Police movement.
When government allows rampant crime – or worse, when it encourages rampant crime by persecuting law-abiding gun owners – government is enabling an assault not just on the American people, but on American liberty itself.
Our Constitution is the greatest charter for freedom in the history of mankind. It is the foundation of the freest and most prosperous country ever conceived. Now more than ever, America needs leaders who will stand up and defend the God-given liberties enshrined in our Constitution.
