CHARLESTON — West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey is co-leading a coalition of 27 state attorneys general in asking Congress to schedule a vote on a resolution involving the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ rule regarding pistol stabilizing braces.
The coalition sent a letter May 25 to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy concerning the Congressional Review Act resolution for the ATF’s final rule — Factoring Criteria for Firearms with Attached Stabilizing Braces — urging the scheduling of a vote early “enough to complete the CRA process before the rule’s May 31, 2023, registration deadline.”
“Although we have filed a lawsuit challenging the pistol brace rule — and have sought preliminary injunctive relief — the matter is too important to be left to the courts,” Morrisey and the coalition wrote.
In February, Morrisey led a coalition of 25 states and others in challenging the rule, calling it unlawful, arbitrary and capricious. The coalition’s motion to preliminarily enjoin the rule remains pending.
“ATF’s final rule is nothing more than an effort to undermine Americans’ Second Amendment rights,” Morrisey said. “This is an egregious final rule turning millions of common firearms accessories into ‘short barreled rifles.’ This is a completely nonsensical regulation.
“Let’s call this what it is: an attack by the Biden administration against lawful gun owners.”
Morrisey's office says stabilizing braces were designed to help people with disabilities use pistols. Since then, many others, including older persons, people with limited mobility and those with smaller stature have come to use the braces. For more than a decade, these braces have been sold as firearms attachments not subject to regulation.
The AG's office, however, says the rule mostly affects owners of combinations of stabilizing braces and pistols and handgun owners. Morrisey's office says many lawful gun owners use stabilizers to prevent some recoil when using firearms and to help with accuracy. An estimated 10 to 40 million pistols with stabilizing braces are presently in circulation nationwide, and the ATF’s rule requires nearly all of them to be registered with the federal government by May 31.
“Although we generally defer to you on the schedule of the House, this issue is pressing and demands immediate action,” the coalition wrote to McCarthy.
Morrisey co-led the letter with Texas. They were joined by Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming.
Also, Morrisey recently joined a coalition of 20 states in filing an amicus brief against what he calls an attack on the American firearms industry.
The Mexican government is seeking $10 billion from several major U.S. firearms manufacturers, saying these companies are responsible for the violence in their country. A U.S. District judge dismissed the lawsuit last September, and the Mexican government appealed. The coalition filed an amicus brief calling on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to affirm the district court’s decisions and dismiss all claims against the American companies.
“This is absurd that Mexico blames our gun manufacturers for the problems they are having with drug cartels,” Morrisey said, joining in writing in the brief that “the available evidence suggests that gun violence in Mexico increased, not because of the expiration of the U.S. assault-weapons ban, but instead because of the Mexican government’s crackdown on the cartels.”
“Mexico advances a legal theory that is unsupported by fact or law. On the facts, American gun manufacturers are not responsible for gun violence in Mexico. Rather, policy choices by the Mexican government, policy failures in the United States, and independent criminal actions by third parties are alone responsible for gun violence in Mexico,” according to the brief. “And on the law, even if Mexico could establish but-for causation between the manufacture of guns in America and gun violence in Mexico, intervening criminal actions preclude finding proximate causation between a gun’s legal sale and the harm caused by it.”
In its lawsuit, Mexico blamed the 2004 expiration of the U.S. “assault-weapons ban” for a spike in gun violence in their country, but the homicide rate decreased in the three years after the American ban ended. The homicide rates didn’t increase until after Mexico declared war on the drug cartels in late 2006.
Before the crackdown, high levels of corruption in Mexico meant that government officials accepted payoffs from the cartels, allowing them to smuggle drugs north of the border with relative ease. This status quo meant that the cartels grew in power, established set territories, and flooded the United States with illegal drugs. The crackdown led to widespread killing and cartels conducting “social terrorism” by killing and kidnapping children until Mexican officials left their territory. As a result, homicides related to the drug war more than doubled and Mexico’s total homicide rate increased by 57% from 2007 to 2008 alone.
Mexico claims that American guns are “among the deadliest and most often recovered at crime scenes in Mexico,” but only a minority of guns recovered at crime scenes in the country – some researchers believe about 12% while Mexican officials estimate it to be only 18% – can be traced back to the United States. Among those, many were sold to the Mexican military or law enforcement and ended up in cartel hands as the result of military or law enforcement desertion.
Even if cartels are using American made guns in the commission of crimes, it’s not the fault of American gun manufacturers. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) protects them from liability stemming from the criminal misuse of guns when they lawfully sell or manufacture firearms in the United States. The law was passed in direct response to lawsuits from anti-gun groups seeking to financially cripple the firearms market — just as Mexico is doing here, recycling the tactics of the American anti-gun lobby.
“The activity that Congress shielded from liability — the production and sale of firearms — occurred entirely in the United States and is protected from the criminal actions of third parties, wherever that might occur,” the attorneys general wrote in the brief. “Mexico’s lawsuit rests on a legal theory that is unsupported by fact or law. This Court should affirm the district court and dismiss all claims against defendants.”
Morrisey joined the Montana-led amicus brief with Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming.