Before we start, check out the final installment of Riding the String over at Glibertarians!
Now then: The Biden(‘s handlers) Administration has been handed a loss over its nonsensical shoulder-brace ban. My RedState colleague Bonchie brought us the news.
In a major win for Second Amendment rights, the Biden administration’s pistol brace ban has been struck down nationwide. A previous ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had given the plaintiffs relief but left everyone still risking a felony by holding onto their pistol braces.
U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmarky of Texas delivered the nationwide injunction, a decision that saves millions from having to destroy their pistol braces or guns altogether.
Millions of law-abiding gun owners who were turned into criminals overnight under the Biden administration’s new pistol brace ban have temporary relief after a federal judge in Texas issued a nationwide injunction preventing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives from enforcing it.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled on Wednesday that the unelected bureaucrats’ attempts to legislate by regulation instead of enforcing the gun laws already on the books were unlawful and, in the case of pistol braces, must cease immediately.
The ATF’s rule, enacted earlier this year, sought to jail and fine any of the estimated 40 million U.S. pistol brace owners who refused to reclassify their weapons as short barrel rifles, which require registration with the government and a $200 tax stamp, or destroy the pistol brace. Gun owners in the 21 states with SBR bans were forced to choose between relinquishing their weapons or destroying their pistol brace-equipped firearms to avoid penalty and punishment.
Full disclosure; as any of you who have read these virtual pages knows, I am not and never have been a Tacticool aficionado, and don’t give two hoots about pistol braces in and of themselves. But from the Second Amendment standpoint, and from the standpoint of the Constitution itself, I care a great deal about massive overstepping by an Imperial agency that, if you care about the Tenth Amendment, shouldn’t even exist.
That being the case, this is a pretty significant win. The entire hooplah over these things was based on the assertion that a pistol brace somehow made a short weapon (most of these things are used on AR-15 “pistols,” a device for which I can’t really see much use, but every cat its own rat) more deadly. How that worked was never clear; the cartridge fired remains the same, the operation of the weapon doesn’t change; the brace doesn’t make the weapon more or less accurate in and of itself. What these braces were designed to do, and what they actually do, is to allow a disabled shooter to handle the weapon with greater ease and improved functionality.
That’s all.
This is a win. But the war for the Second Amendment continues.
