President Biden held a press conference yesterday and informed every pro-gun voter that he has decided to bypass Congress and take executive action to advance gun control. But is what he is attempting to do even possible without legislation? Newell invited Amy Swearer from the Heritage Foundation Friday morning to explain.
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“Amy, the President outlined a couple of things that I'm not sure are wholly achievable,” Newell began. “What are your thoughts?”
“Well, I think there's two big barriers to what he's trying to do here,” Swearer said. “The first is legal. Right now we don't have the rules that he has told the Department of Justice to put out. But if they're anything like some of the other things that the DOJ has tried to do informally, there's going to be some very serious legal issues. Because again, it's not up to the executive branch to rewrite and redefine things that are already defined in federal law. That's Congress’ job. So there are some legal problems depending on what they try to do. And the second is a practical problem. If president Biden is actually interested in not just making political noise, but in reducing gun violence in this country, then what he's actually trying to do isn't going to solve the problem. He's going after things like arm braces for pistols that really aren't major underlying causes of gun crime in any way, shape or form. And also, he's not trying to ban them as much as putting them under the National Firearms Act so you can still get them. It's just going to be more time consuming and cost you $200 and the government's going to get more money out of you.”
“In other words, for that arm brace that he's talking about, you're going to be able to get it, you're going to just have to jump some hurdles to do it,” Newell said. “And most importantly, you're going to pay the government some money?”
“Right, and it's far more likely that what's going to happen is not that criminals are going to stop using the ones they already have, or find other ways of continuing to commit crimes without arm braces. What's more likely is that you're going to have law abiding citizens who have owned these braces responsibly, who are either going to neglect to pay the tax or are not going to be able to pay the tax.”
“And it should be noted for the benefit of the listening audience - this is an apparatus that was actually approved by the ATF, right?”
“Right. The ATF for a long time now has said that if you have what's known as a short barreled rifle, those are highly, highly regulated under the National Firearms Act. Basically these braces are designed to attach to your inner arm and sort of stabilize whatever sort of handgun you're using. Those do not make the gun into a short barreled rifle. And so they're kind of trying to do what they did with bump stocks, which was to say, well, yeah, for a long time we said this didn't do X, Y, and Z, but now we're changing our minds. And all of you who have had it under the auspices of it being legal. Well, sorry to tell you, we've changed the rules on you and it's no longer legal.”