By: Friedrich Seiltgen

Copyright © 2023

The National Association for Gun Rights and its affiliate group, Texas Gun Rights, via its legal branch, the National Foundation for Gun Rights, added another notch to its belt with a win over the new BATFE pistol brace rule in the Northern District of Texas federal appeals court.

Texas Federal District Court Judge Reed O’Connor granted a preliminary injunction in NFGR’s lawsuit challenging the pistol brace rule change.

All National Association for Gun Rights and Texas Gun Rights members are protected from the ATF’s pistol brace rule.

“This is a major victory for the Second Amendment and a blow against the ATF’s unconstitutional legislating by bureaucratic rulemaking,” said Hannah Hill, Executive Director of the National Foundation for Gun Rights. “We want to thank the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, who represented us in this case.”

The rule change had reclassified pistols with stabilizing braces as short-barreled rifles, meaning that the ATF sought to regulate Americans by federal laws that were never intended to apply to them and their firearms.

The ATF’s rule significantly expanded the definition of a rifle and imposed potential criminal liability on millions of Americans without legislative authority.

“The ATF has been overstepping their authority for decades,” said Dudley Brown, National Association for Gun Rights president. “We have a legislature who creates our laws. We don’t need a bunch of unelected bureaucratic cowboys at the ATF hijacking Congress’s job.”

In his ruling, Judge O’Connor said the ATF did not provide a detailed justification for reversing the agency’s longstanding position. For close to a decade, the ATF concluded that “attaching the brace to a firearm does not alter the classification of the firearm or subject the firearm to NFA control.”

The ATF changed course on this position for the first time in 2023, when it issued the final rule, reversing the agency’s otherwise long-standing policy. “When an agency changes course, as [the ATF] did here, it must ‘be cognizant that longstanding policies may have engendered serious reliance interests that must be taken into account.”

The BATFE rule change affected approximately 40 million brace owners. The BATFE required all brace owners to register their brace, turn it in without compensation, or destroy it.

The BATFE stated that only about 250,000 owners registered their brace before the deadline, meaning there is massive non-compliance with the rule change.

The National Association for Gun Rights

The National Association for Gun Rights is the nation’s largest “no compromise” pro-gun organization, with 4.5 million members nationwide. The National Association for Gun Rights has led the charge to halt the radical anti-gun agenda nationwide.

For more information, go to www.nationalgunrights.org.

That’s all for now, folks! Please keep sending in your questions, tips, and article ideas. And as always – “Let’s Be Careful Out There.”

Friedrich Seiltgen is a retired Master Police Officer with 20 years of service with the Orlando Police Department. He conducts training in Lone Wolf Terrorism Counterstrategies, Firearms, and Active Shooter Response.

His writing has appeared in RECOIL, www.floridajolt.com, The Counterterrorist Magazine, American Thinker, Soldier of Fortune, Homeland Security Today, Off Grid, and The Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International.

Contact him at [email protected].