The Notice of Proposed Rule-Making has finally been published.

You can — and should — COMMENT HERE. Commenting closes on August 19, 2021. Please let the ATF know what you think of the disastrous attempt to override Congress.

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Update, 5/21/2021,3PM EDT:
The original URL for the NPRM went dead sometime today. I discovered this when I checked to see if TZP’s or my own comments were visible yet. It’s gone.

The new page is Definition of Frame or Receiver and Identification of Firearms, and the docket number is no longer “ATF 2021R-05;” it is now “Docket (ATF-2021-0001).” You can comment HERE, which I’ll need to do again because our comments on the previous version are gone (a search of the tracking number I was given returns nothing).

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The Zelman Partisans have submitted this comment:

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COMMENT
Tracking Number: koy-csz4-nwkx

The ATF takes note of the fact that existing law, as written and passed by Congress, does not define “firearm” to include many types of implements including AR-pattern arms with separate upper and lower “receivers,” (split-frame) semiautomatic handguns with separate slides and “frames,” or striker-fired implements. The Notice of Proposed Rule-Making pretends that these are recent innovations that Congress could not have envisioned, and thus the ATF must broaden the language of the law to catch up.

1895: Marconi’s radio experiment

1902: First commercially successful radio transmission system

1910: Wireless Ship Act

It only took Congress 8 years to take notice of the new technology. Two years later, Congress passed the Radio Act of 1912; ten years after the first successful commercial system.

In 1927, 25 years — just a quarter century — after Marconi’s FIRST commercial system, Congress chose to greatly expand regulation of the evolving technology.It only took 32 years from Marconi’s radio EXPERIMENT for Congress to join an international treaty on the regulation of radio transmission.

Yet the ATF would have us believe that Congress simply didn’t know about the existence of striker-fired guns for 60 years prior to the passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934. That Congress didn’t know about the existence of split-frame guns like the Browning Model 1911 adopted by the US Army decades before the NFA.

The ATF would have us believe that by 1968, Congress STILL had no clue that striker-fired guns had existed for a century, or that there was such a thing as split-frame semiautomatic handguns since Browning’s design of the M1900 in 1896; 72 YEARS before. That Congress had no idea they’d authorized funds for the US Army to purchase and issue split-frame M16s four years before.

Congress has shown the ability to note and regulate new technologies at less than a glacial pace. But despite THESE devices existing for well over a century, Congress has chosen not to include them in the definition of firearm. We must, then, conclude that Congress saw no need to regulate them, and that ATF doing so violates the intent of Congress.

COMMENT END

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