On June 22, the U.S. Senate voted on House Joint Resolution 44, which sought to disapprove the Biden Administration’s pistol brace rule. While the House passed H.J. Res. 44 on a bipartisan basis, the Senate’s vote stuck straight to party lines, with the provision failing 49-50.
Clearly, Senate Democrat Leadership stood firm in its defense of Joe Biden’s anti-Second Amendment agenda, making sure every member of its caucus would toe the anti-gun line for the party’s professed “leader.” Even the two most prominent Democrats in the Senate that occasionally vote for the rights of law-abiding gun owners—Senators Joe Manchin (W.V.) and Jon Tester (Mont.)—abandoned those innocently caught up in ATF’s pistol brace about-face.
So much for the party of “criminal justice reform,” as the Democrats like to market themselves. By changing a well-settled interpretation of the law and applying it retroactively to individuals who obtained braced pistols according to the rules as they were understood at the time, the ATF rule basically manufactures criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens.
The Senate vote effectively saves Joe Biden the embarrassment (and accountability) of single-handedly rescuing ATF’s ill-considered rule with a veto of H.J. Res. 44. NRA will, of course, continue to challenge the rule through the courts.
In a twist of irony, the Senate’s vote comes the same week it is announced that Biden’s own son, Hunter, has apparently made what looks to be a sweetheart deal with Biden’s Department of Justice after being investigated for lying on an ATF Form 4473 when purchasing a handgun in 2018. For all of the elder Biden’s tough talk about criminals and firearms, it looks like his son will face virtually no significant repercussion for what could otherwise have been several felony violations of federal gun control laws.
As noted elsewhere in the Alert this week, this disparity of outcomes isn’t a flaw with gun control among its supporters; it’s the point of it.
Should anyone be brought up on charges in the future for violating the new rule—if it actually survives the numerous court cases that have been filed against it–don’t expect anything less than jail time for the violator … unless the person charged happens to be related to the “Big Guy.”