Pistols with Stocks Clearly as Dangerous as Nuclear Weapons

The pistol brace ban is dead. Get ready for mass shootings in every Walmart and preschool in America. All is lost.

There I go, channeling Elizabeth Warren again.

For a long time, I’ve been following the pistol brace mess. A brace is a buttstock pretending to be something else, except for a few pistol braces that really are what they say they are. A real pistol brace lets a handicapped shooter use his wrist to support his gun. The pistol braces that drove the ban are just buttstocks trying to be cute. You can buy a short-barreled rifle which has no buttstock and is therefore legally sold as a pistol, and you can put a brace on it in order to be able to shoulder it.

Why would you do this?

Short-barreled rifles are, ridiculously, regulated by the BATF, under an outdated, Constitution-hostile, and absurd law called the National Firearms Act. Congress, incredibly, wanted to ban pistols, along with silencers and machine guns. They wanted to ban all firearms that were easily concealed, so they included shortened long guns. It was an astonishing assault on our civil rights, but for the most part, it worked.

In 1934, they managed to pass the act, and as a result, you can’t own a sawed-off shotgun or short rifle without applying to the feds, putting yourself on a list in DC, and paying $200. The fee has not changed since 1934, when you could buy your own ocean liner for $200. It was a lot of money. A web source puts it at about $4600 2024 dollars. This was supposed to be a de facto ban.

They were not able to ban pistols, but being incompetent and caring very little about the Bill of Rights, they left the stuff about short shotguns and rifles in the law. It shows how close we always are to losing everything. Government officials do not care about our rights very much. This law was passed in 1934, when America was a lot less crazy, and look what they did.

Is a short rifle more dangerous than a long one? Obviously not, but here we are.

Clever 2A people started selling pistol braces in order to get around the law, and for years, the BATF said it was okay. Then Biden got the BATF to change the rules. Then gun owners sued the BATF. The BATF just lost, and the new rule has been vacated nationwide Now you can have your pistol brace.

I see rumblings out there about the BATF continuing to fight, but as of today, you can have a braced “pistol” and not worry about being arrested. That’s good, because there are 10,000,000 in circulation. How many owners is that? Maybe 5,000,000? That’s a lot of prison construction. Prosecution was never really practical.

Now that braces are legal, I’ll just say it: I think they’re fantastic. A rifle is the best possible weapon to use to defend yourself, and in a confined space, a short rifle is king. Swinging a long barrel in a truck is not easy, and you could also have problems in your house.

For a figure in the general area of a thousand dollars, you can get a short AK-47-type rifle (“pistol”), a brace, and a laser. Put it by your bed, and you have an excellent home defense solution. You have 31 very powerful rounds ready to go, in a package which is easier to use than a long gun or ordinary pistol, and it is much, much safer than a pistol, because it’s hard to point it at yourself.

Pistols are not good weapons. They are compromise weapons. They’re like the tiny, fake spare tires carmakers use to cheat customers. You should only defend yourself with a pistol when there is some reason you can’t get ahold of a real gun. You will probaby miss the perp, and if you hit him, you will do less damage than a rifle would do. You will have fewer rounds on tap, and they are much more likely to be blocked by things like walls, furniture, and vests.

You want a projectile which is easy to aim, goes through lots of stuff, does terrible damage to people, and has lots of company. What you really want is for the police to do the shooting for you, facing the physical danger and tort liability, but they almost never make it in time.

Shortened rifles are called “SBR’s,” or “short-barreled rifles.” I call pistols with braces “LBP’s,” or “long-barreled pistols.”

I don’t think braces will be banned again any time during the next few years. Congress would have to do it, and I doubt a new law will find support. I think the federal courts are a dead end for the currently-vacated rule, because the final stop is our conservative Supreme Court.

I have a short AK, and I put what is supposed to be a very good flash hider on it, so a braced pistol will be my number one bedside companion, along with electronic earmuffs that block loud noises but amplify the sounds of a scared burglar trying to hide and ambush me.

This is all good news, but what about the restrictions on machine guns?

Bump stocks can’t be banned by the feds now, so that’s nice. The BATF lost another case. This doesn’t help people like me who live under state bans, but it might help some people. Bump stocks aren’t very accurate, so it’s not like you can go out and get real full-auto legally.

Full-auto guns are still regulated by the NFA, and they are banned by the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act (originally known as the Freedom is Slavery Act), which limits us to old, creaky guns made before May 19, 1986. This is not good, considering the current state of things.

First of all, all sorts of good citizens need full-auto weapons. A lot of people have special security needs. That is obvious. And they should not be limited to incredibly expensive vintage guns that will eventually fall apart.

Second, illegal machine guns are everywhere now, and they’re in the hands of awful people. They are extremely popular in ghettos, where non-blacks and conservatives are considered by many to be legitimate targets for gun crimes. As are blacks, now that I think about it. They make up most of the victims.

Right now, you can go to a website on the regular old Internet and order something called a Glock switch. This is a $20 item, more or less, which allows you to take a Glock or Glock clone and turn it into a select-fire weapon. You would think the feds would have made it impossible to sell these things online, but they have not. They can also be printed at home in plastic, and it is not illegal to own the files needed to print them.

Full-auto crime used to be rare, but it’s becoming common fast. You can easily find videos of stupid kids showing off their machine guns.

They say converted Glocks are hard to control, and I’m sure that’s true, but it’s possible to put contraptions on them to make them easier to hang onto, and even if they’re not all that accurate, how accurate do you have to be at 1200 rounds per second? You can fire two 15-round bursts in the general direction of someone you don’t like and have an excellent chance of hitting him and a 100% chance of forcing him to run off in a panic.

You can also put a longer barrel on a Glock. Long barrel, rifle stock, switch…party time.

Now any imbecile can have a machine gun, but for law-abiding people with a legitimate need to even up, they are unaffordable.

This could be a real problem as society continues to melt.

I don’t have any interest in full-auto guns, but as we descend into chaos, I might need some because of packs of punks roaming around with switched Glocks. Oh, well. BATF knows best. Sometimes you have to take one for the team, allowing yourself and your family to be murdered, robbed, and raped in the name of safe streets.

You can make an AK or AR full-auto very easily, so maybe I should not be concerned. New machine guns owned by civilians are not common now, but if we end up in a situation where people are more afraid of each other than the BATF, conversions will be done nationwide at a rapid rate, as they have already been done in ghettos.

At that point, I would really rather be among the raptured. This place is bad enough as it is. Even if your side wins, living in a constant state of guerrilla warfare is a dreadful prospect. Ask anyone who makes under $200,000 per year and lives in a blue county.

I think the Supreme Court should strike down much of the NFA and FOPA. It’s hard for me to believe the Founding Fathers wanted us to be sitting ducks or that the NFA and FOPA are completely consistent with the Bill of Rights. They certainly go against good public policy.

Our nation started with militias, and a militia armed with substandard weapons is a massacre waiting to happen. One likely reason militias are mentioned in the Second Amendment is to make sure effective weapons, not puny ones, are made available to citizens before the need for militias arises. Militias are armed with privately-owned weapons held by citizens before the action starts. A militia armed with blue-state weapons will have serious problems.

We will almost certainly put together many, many militias before long, and thanks to bad legislation, we will be farther behind than we should be.

Leftists are wrong to think short barrels will cause pandemonium, but arming criminals and disarming the rest of us will have consequences.