More on the New Funding Riders

Dave Hardy has the details on some of the other provisions. Evan Nappen has more details on the shotgun regulation, including the language of the appropriations restriction in that regard:

SEC. 541. None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to pay the salaries or expenses of personnel to deny, or fail to act on, an application for the importation of any model of shotgun if–

(1) all other requirements of law with respect to the proposed importation are met; and

(2) no application for the importation of such model of shotgun, in the same configuration, had been denied by the Attorney General prior to January 1, 2011, on the basis that the shotgun was not particularly suitable for or readily adaptable

It doesn’t completely eliminate enforcement of “sporting purposes” for shotgun importation, it basically just kills ATF’s proposed rule. If a shotgun has already been determined to be not particularly suited to sporting purposes, ATF will still be able to keep it out of the country. They just won’t be able to do any reclassification on the basis of a sporting purposes test.

This has now been signed into law, by the way. I have to say that NRA has gotten very good at playing this game. While everyone was busy getting themselves all worked up about HR822, and Bloomberg and Menino were having their dog and pony show in the Senate, NRA was quietly pushing funding riders that would go unnoticed by our opponents until it was too late. I consider getting Congress to take a whack at the Gun Control Act’s “sporting purposes” language, even if it’s just a modest funding restriction, to be a significant achievement, and certainly a step on the road to possibly getting that provision removed at some point in the future.