Careful! The ATF Might Still Be After Your Pistol Brace

Remember when the ATF made out like it was going to start classifying some firearms with pistol braces as regulated items under the National Firearms Act? And remember how they walked that back afterwards? And supposedly clarified the issue here? Well, if you take a careful look at a case working its way through the federal system, it looks like the ATF hasn’t quite given up on their ban plan yet.

Pistol braces @ TFB:

• TFB Review: Strike Industries Dual Folding Adapter (Stock/Brace)
• SB Tactical SBTEVO-G2: New CZ Scorpion EVO Brace
• EZ Accuracy MPA Pistol Brace Backplate for Masterpiece Arms Pistols
• New SB Tactical HKPDW Brace For MP5 Pistols Now Shipping

The story so far

So-called “pistol braces” aren’t a trick set of suspenders for holding up your gunbelt. They’re a stabilizing arm that sticks out of the back of a pistol-sized firearm that helps you shoot accurately—and they also help you follow the letter of the law. While short-barreled rifles are, like sawed-off shotguns, illegal to possess without the frustration of NFA paperwork, pistols are not. If you want to shoot a compact firearm with some accuracy, a stabilizing brace on a pistol is hassle-free as far as the feds are concerned, while a short-barreled rifle is not.

Or at least, that was the way it was supposed to work. According to the NRA, the ATF still has a court case working its way through the system that claims a firearm with a stabilizing brace should be regulated by the NFA.

The battleground

The NRA singles out United States vs. Taranto as the case that concerns them; you can see paperwork from the case here.

According to the NRA’s summary of the case, the feds have several charges against Taylor Taranto, including a charge of illegally owning a short-barreled rifle due to his possession of a CZ Scorpion EVO 3 pistol with a stabilizing brace attached. When Taranto’s lawyers pointed out that this move ran against the ATF’s policy change, and asked to have the count dismissed, the feds filed an opposition to that motion in July of 2024 saying, essentially, that even if they’d given pistol braces the OK, the department would still judge short-barreled firearms with braces on a case-by-case basis:

Although the rule is stayed (and, now, vacated), ATF is not barred from continuing to enforce the underlying statute as it always has: by making case-by-case determinations about whether particular braced firearms constitute “rifles” under the statute. And of course, because the rule reflects ATF’s best understanding of the statute, those determinations will naturally tend to look substantially like the determinations that would follow from applying the clear framework outline in the rule.

If they don’t like the flavor of what you’re up to, in other words, they’ll still throw the book at you. To which Taranto’s lawyers replied, showing the government’s two-sided thinking:

Notwithstanding these repeated losses [on the validity of the braced pistol rule], the government believes it can continue with this prosecution because it is purportedly not relying on the now-vacated Rule, just relying on the legal conclusions embedded in it. Yet, in the next breath, it claims that Mr. Taranto had fair notice that he had to register the braced pistol because of that very Final Rule. The government’s positions are contradictory, unfair, and most importantly not legally sound.

This issue is unresolved at this point.