Republicans Not Waiting for Trump to Undo Biden Rule on Pistol Braces

Though Donald Trump promised to undo all of Joe Biden’s executive actions on firearms once he took office, his administration has yet to formally introduce a repeal of the ATF’s rules treating unfinished frames and receivers as fully functional firearms, expanding the definition of who is “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms, or regulating brace-equipped pistols as short-barreled rifles that must be registered under the National Firearms Act. 

It’s likely only be a matter of time before intent to roll back those rules is published in the Federal Register, but a group of Republicans on Capitol Hill are adopting another strategy to remove at least one of the regulations. 

Companion bills introduced by Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., and Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., would undo a 2023 ruling by the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that classified pistols modified with stabilizing braces as short-barreled rifles and thus placed them under the National Firearms Act.

The action required all owners of pistols modified with stabilizing braces to pay a $200 fee, register their name with the U.S. Department of Justice and obtain federal approval to construct or transfer a short-barreled rifle or short-barreled shotgun. 

“‘Shall not be infringed’ is crystal clear – and the Biden-era abuses of the Constitutionally protected rights of gun owners across the country need to be undone,” Marshall said in a statement Tuesday. “The SHORT Act takes a step toward rolling back nonsensical regulations that the National Firearms Act has placed upon gun owners.”

The SHORT Act doesn’t directly repeal the Biden-era rule treating brace-equipped pistols as SBRs. Instead, it removes removes certain short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and other weapons from the list of restricted firearms under the National Firearms Act; treating them the same as commonly-sold firearms that can be purchased at retail with a simple NICS check. There’s no need for a rule treating brace-equipped pistols as NFA-restricted items if those items are no longer restricted by the Firearms Act itself.

As Marshall says, this is indeed a step in the right direction. The problem, though, is that the SHORT Act is just as likely to be stymied in Congress as Biden’s gun control agenda was during his time in office. That’s why the former president used and abused his executive authority to promulgate ATF rules that went far beyond the agency’s authority in the first place, and why its incumbent on President Trump to formally repeal those rules through the same process that put them in place. 

I’d love to see SBRs removed from the NFA. Heck, I’d like to see the NFA removed from federal statute. But that’s a big ask in a closely divided Congress, and one where Democrat senators can still block most bills from moving forward thanks to the filibuster rule. The odds of the SHORT Act being enshrined into federal law are pretty long, and the best way to provide relief to the tens of millions of Americans who possess a pistol brace is for the executive branch to step in and rescind the rule that Biden and his allies in the gun control lobby crafted.