DOJ Proposes New Rules To Regulate AR-15, Seeks To ‘Amend’ The Term ‘Rifle,’ Millions Will Be Forced To Register Or Surrender Firearms
The Department of Justice under the leadership of President Joe Biden has introduced new rules to regulate AR-15’s and assist states gun confiscation laws.
The DOJ said it plans to “make it easier for states to craft ‘extreme risk protection orders’ authorizing courts to temporarily bar people in crisis from accessing firearms,” and that “by allowing family members or law enforcement to intervene and to petition for these orders before warning signs turn into tragedy, ‘extreme risk protection orders’ can save lives.”
The legislation framework is designed to allow firearms seizures against a person declared at-risk even if they haven’t been charged or convicted of a crime. The new red flag proposal would allow confiscatory protective order time increments to last from six months to two years. The model also limits the ability of a person targeted with a confiscatory protective order to challenge the order. The proposed framework would only give a person targeted with such order one chance to challenge through a “motion of termination” and “the respondent shall have the burden of proving, by the same standard of proof required for issuance of such an order, that he or she does not pose a [significant danger/extreme risk/other appropriate standard specified by state law] of personal injury or death to himself or herself or another.”
So much for the presumption of innocence.
Additionally the DOJ is attempting to redefine the term “rifle” to include any firearm with a pistol stabilizing braces that have “objective design features and characteristics that indicate that the firearm is designed to be fired from the shoulder.”
The rule change would reclassify the AR-style pistols as rifles as short barreled rifles (SBR) which would require Americans to be regulated under the National Firearms Act (NFA).
The proposed rule change on pistol-braces has already been posted to Burea of Alcohol tobacco and Firearms and Explosives (ATF) website. The ATF stated the agency will “Amend the definition of ‘rifle’ in 27 CFR 478.11 and 479.11, respectively, by adding a sentence at the end of each definition to clarify that the term ‘rifle’ includes any weapon with a rifled barrel and equipped with an attached ‘stabilizing brace’ that has objective design features and characteristics that indicate that the firearm is designed to be fired from the shoulder.”
Aidan Johnston, Director of Federal Affairs for Gun Owners of America said the rule is a “gross abuse of executive authority,” and added that “Millions of otherwise law-abiding gun owners now will be forced to destroy, register, or surrender their lawfully-acquired pistol-braced firearms.”
