Politicizing the ATF
During the briefing, the Chief Counsels Office provided a written brief and a PowerPoint presentation, which discussed automatically and single function of a trigger. The brief and PowerPoint presentation, based on the intent of Congress and the statutory text, detailed how even the Akins Accelerator was not a machinegun. However, Acting Director Sullivan decided, against the advice of the Chief Counsels Office, to declare the Akins Accelerator a machinegun.
It was political.
February 13th, 2019 at 8:19 pm
Everything is political, including the very concept of an ATF, so it is redundant to say “politicizing the ATF”. It has never been, nor could it ever be, anything but political.
Everything is political; the food you eat, the water you drink, the air you breathe, your job, whether you marry, who you marry, the house you live in, whether or not you are allowed to raise and educate your own children and whether, and for what, they will be vaccinated.
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes (shall be) they of his own household.”
If that isn’t politics, there’s no such thing. That is the very grass-roots of politics (all other politics arising there from).
February 13th, 2019 at 9:32 pm
Of course.
Referencing your recent (and understandable) political burnout post, wherein I said and Lyle reiterates above, everything, and most especially guns and gun rights, is political.
February 13th, 2019 at 9:34 pm
Beautiful biblical reference by Lyle btw…
February 16th, 2019 at 12:33 pm
I read somewhere, “You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”
February 16th, 2019 at 8:57 pm
To be fair, I think that the case against the AA stocks (namely that the way the spring was used made them MGs) is actually fairly solid in the regulatory landscape.
It all boils down to what applies the motive force:
Nobody questions that an electrically-powered minigun is an MG, and that a hand-cranked Gatling gun is not an MG. The reason why boils down to how the motive force that operates the gun is applied.
With a minigun, the shooter holds down the fire button, and a battery-powered electric motor (i.e. something other than the shooter) applies the motive force.
With a hand-cranked Gatling gun, the shooter applies the motive force.
The same line exists to divide the AA stocks from the current crop of bumpfire stocks: With the AA stocks, the shooter applies motive force for the first round after which the spring takes over. With the current crop of bumpfire stocks the shooter must constantly add motive force to the system or the gun stops firing.
While it’s a very silly line to have to draw, it’s pretty easy to grasp once you understand it, and BATFE has (at least prior to the current political nonsense against modern bumpfire stocks) been fairly consistent in their enforcement (the shoestring letters I’ve seen appear to have involved a lot of poor phrasing on the authors’ parts, combined with a lot of bad interpretation on the part of the readers).