Remember when the ATF screwed around with the NPRM and commenting process on its bump-fire stock ban rule?
They’re doing again, with the new definitions of “firearm,” “frame, and “receiver.”
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 there, 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).
You’d think that by now the ATF could figure out the whole Administrative Procedures Act thing. But then, they still haven’t figured out “firearm” in decades.
Was watching last week and this week to see when the proposed rule was going to be published in the Federal Register.
It was today.
Only now can people formally submit comments.
And too bad for the folks who commented this morning, on the original-now-deleted docket. How many of them have enough experience with ATF to even think of checking to see if the clowns created a new docket?
That the ATF website allowed comments to be submitted then deleted them may well be evidence of “willfully” violating the APA. Would it nullify this rule? In normal times possibly but not with the politically weaponized Department of Just-Us.
Like every other ATF mess it’s one they created themselves.
The current rule published today is a direct result of ATF failures in 1968-1971 coming home to haunt them. The rule will cause even more downstream problems that will require more rule making to fix…Funny how that works.
Just-Us indeed.
Len, it was on regulations.gov that the docket was deleted and replaced. Would that nullify the rule?
It hasn’t yet with the bump-fire stock rule, where they did the same thing (and that, and other issues violating APA, was part of FPC’s challenge to the rule in Guedes et al).
Yeah, their idea of clarification is a mess. If they really wanted to sort out the whole split-frame/receiver issue, I could that in a single paragraph, without changing any NFA/GCA definition. That the ATF Won’t tells me everything I need to know about their intentions.