The "sole mission" of the Firearms Regulatory Accountability Coalition (FRAC) "is to aggressively advocate for and defend firearms, ammunition, and accessories manufacturers and importers from government overreach," the organization notes on its website.
"This includes holding the government accountable for arbitrary and capricious policies and rulings and ensuring that the government’s regulation of the industry is conducted in an open and transparent manner. FRAC will be the leading advocate of firearms manufacturers, importers, and their customers before federal regulatory agencies," the group added.
On its "Policy and Legal" page, FRAC notes further:
All American industries deserve the ability to operate in a predictable regulatory environment. But for years, the firearms industry has been subject to secret determination letters, policies that change without public input, and shifting subjective standards. Firearm importers, manufacturers, and innovators need clear and consistent laws and effective policies in order to successfully operate.
Importers are regularly forced to wait over a year to have new models evaluated by the government for importation, only to receive a denial for reasons that are nowhere to be found in the regulations or guidance. Manufacturers and innovators are strong-armed into recalling tens of thousands of firearms because government makes post hoc determinations that certain configurations are suddenly illegal.
An industry cannot effectively conduct business in this environment. That’s why the FRAC is standing up for industry members everywhere – from the halls of Congress where we will weigh in on legislation, to the administrative agencies where we will promote industry interests before federal regulators, to the courts where we will fight to defend the rights of the firearm industry and promote good government and the rule of law.
In its most recent legal action, FRAC filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in support of Michael Cargill, who filed suit "urging the appeals court to overturn ATF’s ‘bump stock’ ban and rein in ATF’s abusive attempts to unilaterally expand and rewrite definitions enacted by Congress."
While Biden's regime has run afoul of the law and the Constitution on a number of occasions, the effort to ban the stocks actually began during the Trump administration.
"On December 18, 2018, Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker announced that the Department of Justice has amended the regulations of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), clarifying that bump stocks fall within the definition of 'machinegun' under federal law, as such devices allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger," the ATF noted on its web site. The final rule went into effect on March 26, 2019, the site noted.
The rule did not provide a grandfather clause, meaning anyone who possessed a bump stock had to surrender it.
"Current possessors of bump-stock-type devices must divest themselves of possession as of the effective date of the final rule," the ATF site noted further.
"One option is to destroy the device, and the final rule identifies possible methods of destruction, to include completely melting, shredding, or crushing the device. Any method of destruction must render the device incapable of being readily restored to function," the agency noted further.
In February 2018, President Trump issued a memorandum instructing the AG “to dedicate all available resources to… propose for notice and comment a rule banning all devices that turn legal weapons into machineguns.”
As FRAC notes, what actually happened was that the government rewrote the rules governing machine guns without any congressional approval.
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