Democrats can’t change the law. They don’t have the legislative majority to do it. They’ve appealed to the public. They’ve paraded dead children in hopes of advancing their agenda. It hasn’t worked. It hasn’t worked for years.
Now Biden and his team have decided to engage in what could only be described as a ban on commonly used firearms. Some 10-40 million law-abiding Americans could now find themselves in legal trouble because of the administration’s push to ban pistol stocks. There is no grandfather clause. These guns must be registered, dismantled or turned over to the authorities. This is aptly described as the largest gun confiscation and registration operation in history.
And now Senate Republicans are mobilizing to put an end to this arms trade. Stephen Gutowski of The Reload has more (via Reload):
Forty-eight Republican senators signed a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday criticizing the Biden administration’s plan to ban most gun mounts.
Senators have sharply criticized the ATF’s proposal to reclassify handguns equipped with shoulder straps as short-barreled rifles and subject them to the National Firearms Act (NFA). They warned that the reclassification means that owners who fail to register their guns will face felony charges and up to 10 years in federal prison for each weapon.
“The drafting of the proposed regulations makes it clear that ATF intends to extend NFA coverage to the most common uses of the most commonly owned stabilizers,” the senators wrote in their letter. “Doing so would turn millions of law-abiding Americans into criminals overnight and would constitute the largest executive branch-mandated gun registration and confiscation program in American history.”
[…]
President Joe Biden (D.) doubled down on the kickstand ban Wednesday in his recently announced strategy to fight a rise in violent crime. The ATF listed only two crimes committed using bookends in the proposal, mass shootings in Ohio and Colorado, but did not explain whether the bookend contributed to those crimes. Republican senators said the proposal would do nothing to reduce the recent spike in murders.
“A crime wave is sweeping across America,” they said. “These aren’t broken windows crimes; these are violent crimes like murder, assault, and robbery. But instead of going after the criminals who are turning America’s cities into war zones, the ATF and the Justice Department have chosen to go after law-abiding gun owners who are going about their business and using equipment that the ATF apparently blessed in 2017.”
The White House and Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment. April Longwell, head of ATF’s Public Affairs Division, said the agency “cannot comment on proposed regulations or communications between the agency and Congress.”
Oh, who are the two Republicans who refused to sign this message? They were Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Susan Collins (R-ME). They did not provide any comment.
And speaking of comments, the change in regulations is open to public discussion. Over 30,000 comments were published about this unconstitutional change in regulations. This is an attempt to implement what the anti-gun left has been dreaming of for years. It’s a terrible parade, and for some reason two GOP senators want to sit on the sidelines. We should expect Collins to be faint in the fights that define us as a national party.
