Thirty-four rulemakings on a single day is the largest voluntary
contraction of ATF authority in my lifetime, and it is also less
than it advertises itself to be. Both of those things are true.
Reform packages always read as victories on the page they are
printed on. The trick is to read the column the agency did not print
and the page numbers it did not file.
Zero Tolerance was the worst of it and Zero Tolerance has been
gone for a year. The package now formally proposes to
pull the brace rule and the EITB rule from the books. The bump-stock cleanup
matches
Cargill and is already a Final Rule. Reform
28 — the new statutory definition of "willfully" — quietly converts the
5370.1H administrative protection into something a federal court can enforce
against the agency. That is real.
The agency that wrote the regulations is the same agency now
striking them off the books.
And the column the agency did not print: the frames-and-receivers
rule survives. The NFA registry survives. The roughly 520,000 bump
stocks Americans handed over are not coming back. The statutory
expansion of "engaged in the business" that Congress passed in BSCA
is intact and will outlive every administration that inherits it.
None of the 34 notices is a new restriction on lawful gun owners —
but none of them rolls back BSCA, and none of them touches NICS
itself.
The right way to read this package is as a
policy retreat under court pressure, not a
philosophical conversion. The cases that forced the agency to write
this document — Cargill, Mock,
VanDerStok, Texas v. ATF — all came from outside the
building. ATF did not wake up. It was woken up. Repeatedly. By judges.
Twenty-seven of the thirty-four are still proposals.
Comment on them. The retention-period question and the
"willfully" definition are the two most consequential items in the entire
package, and they are both NPRMs. The window closes when ATF says it does.
Take the win. Catalog the survivors. Then file comments.
Twenty-seven of the thirty-four are still proposals
ATF is explicitly soliciting public comment on each NPRM. The comment period is the only window in which the public, industry groups, and 2A organizations have actual influence over what the final rules look like. The retention-period question (Reform 7), the "willfully" definition (Reform 28), the brace rescission (Reform 1), and the EITB rescission (Reform 2) are all still open. Use them.