After the mass shooting at a Nashville, Tennessee, school on Monday, the House Judiciary Committee postponed a vote on a resolution to get rid of an ATF pistol brace rule that was supposed to happen on Tuesday.
“Democrats were going to use this sad event for political purposes,” Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told The Hill on Monday night.
First, Punchbowl News said that the hearing would be pushed back.
Police say that on Monday, a 28-year-old woman killed three 9-year-old students and three adults who worked at the private Christian school Covenant School in Nashville. The police said that the shooter had a handgun and weapons that looked like assault rifles.
Republicans want to get rid of an ATF rule that would reclassify pistols with a stabilizing brace as short-barreled rifles and require people to register pistols with stabilizing braces by May 31, 2023.
Jordan said, “This issue, which we were going to vote on tomorrow, will be voted on here in a couple of weeks because it has to do with the Constitution.” “An agency told the Americans that the rule was one thing.
After 10 years, they just made a change without going through Congress. So, this is a Constitutional issue, but Democrats were already talking about making everything political, so we just decided to put it off.”
When the rule was announced by the Justice Department, it said that the new rule makes sure that manufacturers, dealers, and people who use stabilizing braces to turn pistols into rifles with barrels shorter than 16 inches follow the laws for short-barrel rifles.
In 2012, when the ATF said that pistol attachments do change how a pistol is classified, this was not the case. “Back when Al Capone was in power, Congress said that short-barreled rifles and shotguns with their barrels cut off should have more rules than most other guns.
ATF Director Steven Dettelbach said in a statement in January that this is because short-barreled rifles have the same power as long guns but are easier to hide like pistols.
“But some so-called stabilizing braces are made to fit on pistols and turn them into short-barreled rifles that can be fired from the shoulder. So, the law says that they must be treated the same way.”
