Here We Go With Badly Drafted Bills

Now we have a bill number, HR3999, put forward by Rep. Carlos Curbelo, which is our bipartisan train wreck. You can see the text here, and it’s basically a restatement of Feinstein’s ban. Way overly broad, and not at all carefully drafted. Three Pennsylvania Republicans have signed onto this bill.

  • Charlie Dent has been OK on the issue, but he’s now a retiring lame duck, so there’s not going to be much threatening him.
  • Ryan Costello is Jim Gerlach’s replacement, and is showing to have little spine.
  • Pat Meehan is no surprise here. He’s been weak on the issue from the get go.

I don’t expect any of these guys to come out and scream “machine guns for all,” but this bill is badly done. The problem is there are a lot of things that can affect the rate of fire of a semi-automatic firearms without enabling it to fire like a machine gun. Among items that could be banned under this bill:

  • Match grade triggers.
  • Muzzle brakes.
  • Recoil weights
  • Buffer springs
  • Bolt carriers of different weights.

The list could go on. NRA is taking the position that Congress and state lawmakers need to wait for ATF to complete its review. So far, the FSB reviewer who green lighted the bump stock is saying they couldn’t find any way to classify it as a machine gun. Really, you classified the Akins Accelerator as a machine gun, they took the spring out of it, and you green lighted that. Seems to me if the Akins Accelerator was a MG, adding a spring makes any reciprocating stock similar to it, only without a spring readily convertible. Not that I’m interested in giving ATF an out.

Like I’ve said, I’m willing to trade bump stocks for SHARE or National Reciprocity, but only if it’s done with precision. This bill ain’t it. Not even close. This bill we have to kill.

 

14 thoughts on “Here We Go With Badly Drafted Bills”

  1. Seven out of the 11 Republican sponsors/co-sponsors are rated A Endorsed by the NRA-PVF. Pressure needs to be brought on these seven to drop their co-sponsorship.

    According to the Washington Free Beacon, the NRA has come out against both this bill and Feinstein’s S1916.

    1. While it may have made political sense in the past for NRA reward someone with an “A” rating if they are with us 90% of the time or agree with us on 90% of the issues on the questionnaire, it’s pretty obvious today that 10% “margin” is what kills us when this stuff comes up. Same thing with Toomey and the UBC bill. It’s time to get more aggressive on gun rights “true believers” versus useless eaters…

    1. By the time that they figure it out, we hold hearings, and the ATF weighs in, it’ll be an election year and the impetus to do something will have passed.

      And that may just have been the whole idea behind why NRA did the ‘push’ for ATF to re-review itself on something that they simply are unable to find a way to regulate. Make ATF basically do nothing while on the clock, a thing which I’ve yet to see a bureaucrap complain about.

      But “Oh God No! The traitors of the NRA sold us down the river! It’s the End Of The World!â„¢ The Apocalypse had befallen us! They agreed to ban our guns!”

      Doubt my hyperbolics? Go read some other venues where those who just squeal like a stuck pig seem the most rational.

    2. “A stock with an integral mechanism or parts designed to be inserted into a stock meant to allow the reset of the trigger without movement of the trigger finger not found in the standard design of a given firearm.”

      Technically speaking this leaves open someone designing a gun with such a stock from the ground up to get by it, but closes off aftermarket bump stocks without AFAIK damaging any other aftermarket parts.

  2. Congress critters don’t draft their own bills-that is done by staff. I assume this was done by the House drafting office. Any bets on whether Boehner/Ryan have cleaned out the Pelosi creatures?

    1. At least /so far/ it’s not bipartisan.

      So those 171 co-sponsers are the vast majority of the Democratic Party Reps.

    2. Wow. That co-sponsor list is truly the who’s who of useless anti-gun Democrats.

    3. Warning! This bill is a backdoor attempt to ban magazines.

      Nowhere in the text of the bill does it define the critical language of, “…increase the rate of fire…”

      “It shall be unlawful for any person—
      12 ‘‘(1) in or affecting interstate or foreign com-
      13 merce, to manufacture, possess, or transfer any part
      14 or combination of parts that is designed and func-
      15 tions to increase the rate of fire of a semiautomatic
      16 rifle but does not convert the semiautomatic rifle
      17 into a machinegun; or”

      Imagine when the ATF would be given regulatory authority if this bill became law, the ATF could easily rationalize that any magazine of greater than five rounds exceeds “sporting uses” and functions to “increase the rate of fire”.

  3. When you put it that way, technically (or technicality-ly? lol) speaking, a bumpfire stock doesn’t increase the rate of fire of the gun itself. It simply allows the user to access more of the cyclical rate that’s already there.

    As such, if this passed, by the time the lawyers and courts were done, actual bump stocks and such might slip through while things like trigger jobs and different bolts which can affect cyclical rate get hit.

    Which, in turn would be decried as a “loophole” and demands for even more poorly written law to “fix.”

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