Federal gun laws are an extreme example of an executive agency making substantive changes. The ban on pistol kits is a good case study. The difference between manufacturing/transferring a pistol legally and doing it illegally is very simple: ten years in federal prison. Usually, it requires an act of Congress to turn something from a fun weekend activity into a federal felony. In the case of pistol kits, all it took was a couple Department of Justice employees changing their mind — and then changing it back, before changing it back to the first position again, and now maybe landing somewhere in between. Assuming they don’t discuss it again and find a new position to take.
None of this is unique to guns (just ask https://x.com/CrimeADay), but guns are a salient example because they’re at a unique intersection: extremely accessible and extremely heavily regulated. Yes, you can be charged with a federal crime if you sell bacon with an incorrectly positioned transparent preview window on the package:
But there aren’t 90 million people in the US packing bacon. There are 90 million people with guns, and unless they’re within 1 degree of separation from the people reading this newsletter, they probably have no idea about the pistol kit ban. Nor had they heard about the bump stock ban, the pistol brace ban, or any other open letters the ATF has sent declaring new crimes.
So it’s good news that the ATF might loosen the pistol kit ban a bit. But the power to loosen the laws is just the flip side of the power to tighten the laws, and that’s a power that no one entity should possess.
— Open Source Defense in The law is the law, unless the ATF sends some emails