With the ATF appearing to essentially throw out regulation of short-barreled rifles, should we expect a renaissance in stocked pistols? Personally, I think not. They are very specialized tools that have been around for as long as pistols have, but have never been very popular because of all the sacrifices they make. I think there will be a spurt of interest on the basis of them being taboo items, but most people will pretty quickly become disillusioned with the impracticality of stocked pistols for most purposes.
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As with suppressors, BATFET has “agreed” to not enforcing the NFA restrictions on “short-barreled rifles” since Congress reset the license fee to $0.
That is not the same thing as repealing the statute.
The National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Safe Streets and Crime Control Act of 1968 are still on the books in toto. The laws still exist.
All it will take is a change in administrations and a BATFET Director who returns to the “cultural norm” of that anti-Second Amendment cult to reverse the policy. At which point anyone with any proscribed item in their possession will likely end up in a Federal prison.
To the loud cheers of “enlightened progressives” from newsrooms to faculty lounges across America.
What is needed is for Congress, in no uncertain terms, to repeal the statutes which Congress voted into law to begin with.
Followed by Congress and the Executive Branch dis-establishing BATFET by the same mechanism with which Richard Nixon created it in its present form in 1969.
Incidentally, it is the only agency within the Justice Department which is charged with both law enforcement and tax collection; An exception to normal separation of powers that is generally restricted to agencies of the Treasury Department, which is where BATFET was to begin with, along with the Internal Revenue Service. When President George W. Bush “moved” BATFET from Treasury to DoJ after 9/11, he created a conflict of interest due to not addressing this.
There are many Constitutional issues with that agency. This is just one of them.
clear ether
eon
Good post. This is a policy change, not a change in the law or a dictate from the Supreme Court. The ATF did this only because of pressure from Trump. When Trump is no longer President, the next President may allow the ATF off its leash again. So many unanswered questions here. I am not going to buy/make supressors or SBRs/SBSs until the matter is clearer and permanent.
Nope, and there’s a huge difference between enforcement policy change and law change. The good news is that once enforcement of a law stops, the conduct prohibited explodes. I’m old enough to have worked in law enforcement when both Homosexual Conduct and Communism were arrest titles in Texas. Never saw anybody take someone to jail for either though, and pretty soon the legislature caught up with removing the laws. Not saying that’s the case here, but one can hope.
I already removed my arm brace from my AR9 pistol, and installed a carbine stock.
I have always maintained that a shoulder stock attached turns a practical pistol into an indifferent carbine. The only real exceptions were the various long-barreled “carbine” variants of the Mauser C/96, the Parabellum, and the Smith & Wesson .320 single-action revolvers.
The “canteen” shoulder stock for the Colt 1860 army and 1861 Navy percussion revolvers had a certain utility. Mostly because being copper-lined, they could be filled with liquids rather more ardent than water.
😉
cheers
eon
A couple of my favorite exhibits at the Texas Ranger Museum are C&B Colts with flasks in the stocks. This could be the chance to make pistol stocks cool again.
The “stocked pistol” concept fails on the same fundamental reasons why the various “supersize” pistols like the MK23 and Beretta M92 family do: Too much weight/volume for the amount of “cartridge power” that you get for lugging all that mass around.
If you’re going to have to have something in that size class, why the hell wouldn’t you go for an actual rifle-caliber weapon in that size/weight category? The range/lethality benefits for recognizing reality and going to a 5.56X45 or even a 7.62X39 cartridge are exponentially greater, in about the same mass/size class. So, why?
About the only thing I can think of is that you’re in some sort of demented situation wherein you have to keep it pistol-caliber due to either backstop or regulatory requirements. Even with those constraints, you’re actually better off going with a rifle-caliber choice, in that you’ll be able to use fewer rounds for the same effect…
Stocked pistols? LOL… Just not a rational solution. Not since the days of the Colt Dragoon, which was damn near a rifle-caliber weapon in terms of contemporary effect anyway.
China from 1901 to the first revolution in 1925. After the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when the “Sacred Order of Harmonious Fists” somehow got brand-new Mauser rifles sooner than the Prussian Army did, there was a “gentlemen’s agreement” between the various powers involved not to sell military rifles- any military rifles- to either the central (Manchu) government or the various “warlord” armies.
One side effect of this was all those weird-ass “Chinese Warlord Pistols” that Ian features so often. (Not a slam; I find those gadgets even more interesting than Cao Dai 1911, French M50, and P35 copies.)
The broader effect, though, was that Mauser did a land-office business selling C/96 pistols with the shoulder-stock holsters to all concerned. They were issued in lieu of rifles on the grounds that a stocked pistol like the “Broomhandle” was easier for a common soldier (aka “peasant”) to actually hit something with than a pistol fired the “normal” way (one-handed, back then).
Also, the ’96’s ten-shot magazine gave said common soldier twice as many tries between reloads than most bolt-action rifles of the era.
And even without the “agreement”, the British weren’t selling SMLEs to anybody in China, no way, no how. As to why not, two words; Hong Kong.
The final result of this was of course the Mauser Model 712 aka “Schnellfeuer”. But that was actually a response to the Spanish makers like Astra and Beistegui Hermanos, who had been selling Broomhandle clones in China and the Far East as early as 1922-23, and had developed selective-fire variants by 1926-27 specifically for the Chinese and other Far East “markets”.
It could be argued that the “Broomhandle” stayed in production as long as it did, and was available for German service in World War One when everybody was short of pistols for trench fighting, mostly because of the demand for them in Asia.
The real answer to the warlords’ prayers, of course, showed up just in time for the second major revolution in China, the Communist vs Nationalist one. Namely, the Russian PpSh-41 SMG in 7.62 x 25mm Tokarev. After Mao & Co. won that one, the “Pay-Pay-Shay” became the default light automatic weapon of the People’s Liberation Army. (Proving that even assholes can have good taste.)
In Korea, most historians state that the Chinese “Volunteers” were only lightly armed with the ’41, to the tune of maybe 10-15% of the grunts. According to my uncle who was there (Marine Recon, doing observe & report on first North Korean and then Chinese forces moving south starting with the destruction of Task Force Smith at Osan on 5 July 1950 and right down to the Pusan Perimeter), it was more like 25% of the NKPA infantry and about a third of the Chinese.
The Chinese had obviously grokked the whole “sustained firescreen” thing before we did. And if you’re working with fundamentally illiterate troops, it does make training easier. (“Point this thing at the enemy, pull the trigger, reload when it stops shooting.”)
clear ether
eon