Brace Yourselves

T he Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has proposed a set of criteria for distinguishing legal and illegal arm braces for pistols that would make roughly 40 million Americans into felons.

There is no evidence that pistol braces are especially favored by criminals. They aren’t really. Criminals tend to prefer guns that are much easier to conceal, and although short-barreled rifles are easier to conceal than long-barreled rifles, they aren’t particularly easy to hide on one’s person. That’s why criminals, in general, don’t use rifles at all. But lately, almost all the focus of gun regulation is on the features found on rifles.

The National Firearms Act (NFA) imposes a set of annoying regulations that strongly discourage the use and sale of short-barreled rifles. Short-barreled rifles, as my colleague Kevin Williamson has explained elsewhere, are less accurate and powerful than longer ones. But pistols that have been designed with arm braces that could be (let’s be honest, usually are) shouldered, have become immensely popular in recent years. Many firms market these as PDW — personal-defense weapons.

The personal-defense weapon has a real appeal to gun owners looking for a suitable firearm for home defense or a gun to keep in a truck. The shorter barrel makes it easier to move around the interior of a home or in a car. And the arm brace, often adjustable, makes it easier to fire more accurately. Shooting a pistol accurately in an adrenalized situation is actually pretty tough to do. But if you put that smaller pistol-caliber bullet in a slightly larger gun, and you have a brace that gives you more points of contact, you are likely to fire more accurately.

But the arm brace is like many other features that heavily regulated states such as New York and California discourage or ban — features like “barrel shrouds,” pistol grips on rifles, muzzle devices, etc. It is like them in that these can make it easier to fire a gun accurately and safely. This is precisely what offends progressive gun-regulators. They primarily think of guns as weapons to be used to commit crimes. The more effective the weapon is, the worse it is.

That’s not great for those of us who view our guns primarily as a means of defending ourselves from violent crimes, or as implements used in sports. And the effect of regulations like these — the ones aimed at the features that make guns easier to use safely — is more than a little perverse. The legal hassle put on firearms that might be used in this category of “personal defense” has led manufacturers to market, and customers to covet, firearms that have the maneuverability and comparable weight of an AR-style pistol, but which avoid regulations.

Hence the recent explosion in popularity of firearms such as the Mossberg Shockwave, the Remington TAC-13, or the Black Aces Pro-S. They are all shotguns, quite a bit different from rifles, and which just barely avoid NFA designations. These weapons are not designed to be shouldered. They feature a bird’s-eye style grip. They are, I can attest, fun as hell to shoot. But they take a great deal more practice and physical strength to master than the personal-defense weapons that the ATF is targeting by regulating pistol braces. That is, when you have a Mossberg Shockwave, you are more likely to fire the weapon and watch it jump out of your hands altogether, or fire way too high or low.

The proposed rule to regulate arm braces is also, let’s be totally honest, quite prolix and stupid. It sets up a complex point system in which features such as a place to attach a strap to the brace make it a worse, more-evil brace and put the owner into the category of felon. These vague and often hard-to-interpret rules have become the norm for gun regulations such as New York’s SAFE Act, and they tend to just make people confused. Different gun shops literally follow different interpretations of the rule — with sellers and buyers taking risks, or not taking them.

The rules are not just dumb, but incredibly easy for law-abiding citizens to foil. The ATF doesn’t even expect that if its rule is adopted, most of the 40 million brace owners will turn theirs in to the cops; they expect the item will just be removed from the gun. But, if most of these guns remain personal-defense weapons, then if they are used in a home-defense situation, the owner could simply use the braced weapon in the encounter and then remove the offending brace before the cops arrive.

These scholastic-style legal debates about the features on modern pistol-caliber carbines are not going to end, precisely because of this paradox in which non-gun-owning anti-gun activists see features that make weapons safer for the owners and conclude that they have therefore become more dangerous to the public at large. But perhaps the more of these debates we have, the more the courts will have the occasion to conclude that henpecking the features of guns in common use is an irrational exercise and merely an attempt at undermining the exercise of the Second Amendment.