Short Barreled Rifle Vs Pistol Brace

hey everybody i am chris baker from luckygunner.com today i want to talk about how and why we got to a place where the federal government considers this to be a pistol and this to be a rifle despite the fact that they look nearly identical i'm also going to get into the benefits of owning a registered short barreled rifle versus a large format pistol there are pros and cons to each both legally and practically speaking for the sake of simplicity i'm going to refer to this broad category of firearms as pdws which is short for personal defensive weapons now i know that technically pdws are selective fire but obviously we are looking at their semi-auto counterparts here basically we're talking about firearms that are somewhere between what we typically think of as a pistol and what we typically think of as a carbine my demo gun today is this ar pistol it's a cmmg banshee nine millimeter upper with a five inch barrel on an aero precision lower receiver in a pistol configuration it feeds from p mags with a nine millimeter conversion kit i've got some other stuff planned for this gun if you guys want to hear more about it in the future a couple of quick disclaimers before we really get into it i am going to be talking a lot about firearms law and interpretation of that law but i am not a lawyer or legal expert of any kind lucky gunner is the name of our online ammo store it is not the name of a good legal strategy you really shouldn't listen to me and if you follow my suggestions and get arrested that is your fault also everything in this video is current as far as i know as of mid-july 2020 but this stuff can change at any time if you are watching this a couple of years or even a couple of months down the road there's a good chance that at least some of what i'm about to say no longer applies and you should be aware that my focus here is federal law some states have laws regarding short-barreled firearms that are even more restrictive than federal laws so do your homework there one last thing before we get into it i am not bringing this topic up as a way to promote any political agenda it's not that that stuff is irrelevant or that i don't have an opinion it is just beyond the scope of our discussion today my goal here is to simply explain the reality of the legal situation and what options you have as far as the hardware you can own if you don't like that legal situation i fully encourage you to take some proactive steps to change it write a letter join a protest join an organization but please no one in the comments section really wants to read your political manifesto so take that somewhere else okay back to the topic at hand and let's start with a little history lesson we have to go back to the year 1934 with the passage of the national firearms act now that covers a lot of territory and it's been amended a few times over the years for now the part that we're concerned with is minimum barrel lengths according to the nfa rifles must have a barrel length of at least 16 inches for shotguns it's 18 inches anything shorter is considered a short barreled rifle or shotgun now you can own an sbr or sbs as they're commonly known but you first have to pay the atf a 200 tax for each one you also have to submit some paperwork with that 200 and these days it can take over a year for the atf to process and approve your application now let's fast forward to somewhere around a decade ago the black rifle market was booming and the gun companies were running out of ideas for ar variants we started seeing something on the market that had previously been somewhat uncommon and that was ar style pistols these were essentially ar-15s with no shoulder stock without a stock legally speaking it's not a rifle it is a pistol because it's a pistol there is no restriction on minimum barrel length so you can have an ar with a barrel under 16 inches and it's completely legal no nfa paperwork required no 200 tax it is a pistol and it wasn't just ars that got the pistol treatment there were pistol style aks and pistol versions of pistol caliber carbines and all kinds of other guns the ars are kind of unique though because they still have the buffer tube or receiver extension this tube is not just something to attach a stock to it is a necessary part of the gun there is a spring and buffer in here and the gun has to have those things in order to function at first i think most of us who would consider ourselves serious shooters thought of these large format pistols as nothing more than a novelty or a fad they are too big to shoot like a traditional pistol and without a stock you can't really run them like like a rifle you lose your your third and fourth points of contact that make a rifle a rifle but a lot of people were buying them and having fun with them and that is fine there is nothing wrong with a good range toy if that's your thing now fast forward again a couple of years to 2013 and the introduction of the stabilizing pistol brace sb tactical was the first company to develop one of these things it is essentially a device that's designed to allow the shooter to brace a pdw style firearm against their forearm so that they can shoot it one-handed the inventor actually came up with the idea so his disabled friend could more easily shoot an ar pistol one-handed since then several other pistol brace designs have come out some of them have loops and velcro straps like this one some of them don't the atf has signed off on this they individually have approved several of these devices and said yes you can attach a brace to your pistol and it's still a pistol it is not a short barreled rifle with an ar you can stick it on the buffer tube other types of pdws use folding extensions and other add-ons to attach the brace to the receiver so that is how we ended up with pistols that look just like short-barreled rifles but they are regulated completely differently now here is where things get messy it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to look at one of these things and consider that you know in a pinch one could rest that brace against one's shoulder and it might work a whole lot like a rifle stock that's exactly what some people did and other brace owners were a little more reluctant so the atf started getting a lot of questions about the legality of using a pistol brace like you would use a shoulder stock after several ambiguous and conflicting statements from various atf personnel in 2015 the atf wrote an open letter the letter points out that the nfa definitions of both rifle and shotgun include the phrase weapon designed or redesigned and intended to be fired from the shoulder since the nfa doesn't elaborate on what the word redesign means the atf had their own interpretation they took it to maine that anyone who shoulders a pistol with a brace has quote redesigned the gun to be an unregistered short-barreled rifle which is a felony so understandably sales of pistol braces dropped somewhat shooters were reluctant to own something that could just spontaneously make them a felon if they just happened to hold it incorrectly when the wrong person just happened to be watching a lot of legal experts called foul on that including sb tacticals attorneys their basic reasoning was that someone using a pistol brace in a way other than it was intended should not change the legal classification of the hardware itself using something incorrectly is not the same as redesigning it in 2017 atf issued a response but what's interesting is that they didn't write another open letter to clarify their 2015 letter it was a private letter addressed only to sb tactical's legal team fortunately sb tactical made that letter public the atf's clarification was that quote incidental sporadic or situational use of an arm brace in its approved original configuration at or near the shoulder does not constitute a redesign they also say it would be considered redesigning the gun if you physically altered the arm brace in any way to make it easier to use it as a rifle stock the examples they give are removing the arm strap if it has one or permanently attaching the arm brace to the buffer tube now some people have taken this 2017 letter to mean that you can do whatever you want with a pistol brace as long as you don't make any modifications to it but i don't think it's that simple one thing the atf has been consistent about is that if you buy a pistol brace with the intention of using it as a shoulder stock and getting around the sbr laws you are in violation of the law since they can't read people's minds to know their intent the atf is looking for indicators of intent the legal term for that is manifest intent your behavior indicates your intent modifying a brace with the examples they gave is just one indicator unfortunately the atf has not been forthcoming about what other indicators they are considering so we're basically back to where we were before 2015. again individuals and companies are getting arbitrary and sometimes contradictory advice from various atf personnel some sources have said that the atf expects your brace equipped pistol to have a length of pull under 13 and a half inches that's the distance from the trigger to the end of the stock or in this case the end of the brace some have said the atf frowns on braced pistols with magnified optics unless it's a ford mounted long eye relief optic it's been rumored that they don't like braces on pistols weighing less than something like 40 ounces so like a glock with a brace attached to a stock adapter none of these supposed rules have been made public and there is no way to know when the atf has come up with a new one considering the stiff penalties involved if someone were convicted of violating the nfa laws and the fact that there are i don't know something like three million pistol braces out there in the wild that legal ambiguity is a pretty big problem it's a big enough problem to have shown up on the radar of a few us congressmen last month seven of them assigned a letter to the atf asking them to quit messing around and just tell us the actual rules for determining what's a pistol and what's a short barreled rifle hopefully we will hear something approaching a final answer in the near future and hopefully it will be favorable for gun owners but again i am not bringing this up to make any kind of political statement it's just that if you own a pdw you should know that the rules are not always clear so until that situation is resolved let's take a look at what our options are if you're interested in owning a pdw style firearm there are a few different ways you can go about it first you can just ignore all the laws completely it's pretty easy to do you just get a pistol and then put an actual rifle stock on it don't pay the tax don't register it and have fun but don't do that i know it seems like it would be just barely a crime something like speeding but the atf takes it pretty seriously if you're convicted of violating the nfa you could face jail time of up to 10 years and fines up to 250 000 for each offense and since it's a felony you would be prohibited from owning any firearms for the rest of your life so no bueno second you can go with a legal registered short barreled rifle you can buy one or build one either way it'll cost you 200 for the nfa tax stamp if you buy an sbr outright that's going to be an atf form 4 it usually takes at least a few months to get one of those processed again sometimes up to a year or even more after it's approved you can pick up the gun from your ffl dealer if you build one that's an atf form one now lately they've been approving those much more quickly sometimes in just three or four weeks building an sbr really can just mean that you buy a pistol and then once your stamp comes back you can put a stock on the gun that is considered making an sbr there are more details you should know before you go the nfa route fortunately we've got access to a ton of great resources online for filling out that paperwork to make sure it gets processed as quickly as possible and just as a quick aside i know i haven't had many nice things to say about the atf but i do want to acknowledge that there are a lot of good hard-working people employed by the atf especially on the admin side of things some of them are even shooting enthusiasts just like you and me so if you have to talk to someone at the atf about your paperwork for whatever reason just keep in mind they are not the ones responsible for the dysfunctional rules and regulations once your form 1 or your form 4 gets approved there are very few downsides to owning an sbr you can have whatever barrel length or stock you want and you can change it whenever you want just like any other firearm it's only the receiver that legally counts as the sbr the rest of the gun can be configured and reconfigured at will so for example if you have an ar with an sbr lower receiver you can own multiple upper receivers to swap around and use with that lower now there are some drawbacks to taking the sbr route of course you are registering the gun with the federal government and that would put you in the atf's database that understandably doesn't sit too well with a lot of people also in some states it is illegal to have a loaded rifle in your vehicle but you can have a loaded pistol so if you've got the gun in your go bag or whatever a registered sbr would have to be totally unloaded in those states no mag no round in the chamber for a lot of people the main disadvantage of an sbr is the interstate travel restriction even if your sbr is registered and completely legal you can't take it across state lines without first notifying the atf there's a special form you have to fill out and wait for the atf to approve it now it's usually fast a fast turnaround maybe a couple of weeks to get that back but it's still a hassle one of the great things about an sbr is that it's easy to pack up and take with you but that is somewhat negated by the interstate travel rule your third option for owning a pdw is to of course get a pistol with a stabilizing brace with a pistol you don't have to deal with any of the disadvantages of an sbr no registration no notification requirement for interstate travel no 200 attacks the downsides you have to be really careful about how that gun is configured so that it legally stays a pistol there are certain things you can do to a rifle that you cannot do to a pistol without violating the nfa for example you cannot put a vertical foregrip on a pistol and the definition of vertical foregrip is another one of those things that atf has not always been super consistent about does an angled foregrip like this one count as a vertical foregrip maybe maybe not depends on what day of the week you asked the atf now personally i have never had much use for vertical foregrips angled or otherwise so i don't consider that to be much of a disadvantage but there are other issues with the braced pistol pdws stabilizing pistol braces are not exactly cheap the most popular models have an msrp around 150 to 200 there are some inexpensive pistol braces but they tend to be not quite as comfortable to use and you might even have to make some modifications to your gun to get them to fit with like special buffer tubes and stuff so a pistol with a brace is not necessarily going to save you a whole lot of money versus just paying for a 200 tax stamp the biggest disadvantage to a braced pistol is what i kind of already talked about they are in this sort of legal gray area that could change at any minute you're not supposed to buy a pistol brace solely as a means of avoiding sbr laws the atf is really unlikely to change their stance on that part of the issue what could and probably will change are the criteria the atf is using to determine what is and isn't a pistol brace and how a brace can be used or they could resort to the nuclear option and just outlaw pistol braces completely the atf doesn't need any new legislation or a judge to be able to do that and the fact that they've already said they're okay doesn't change anything they can just write letters and boom you have to get rid of your pistol race or you're committing a felony for the time being pistol braces are totally legal as long as you use them as intended they may or may not be legal to own if you sometimes use them as they were not intended until there is more clarification on that you probably will not see me shoulder a pistol brace on camera and i'm not suggesting you do it either now i do want to suggest one more alternative for a pdw you could simply go with a large format pistol without the brace the benefits of going this route are that you don't have to deal with that legal ambiguity as far as i know the atf has not even hinted that they might want to reclassify ar pistols as sbrs when there is no brace involved and if you really want to go the extra mile you can install a plain pistol buffer tube like this one if your ar doesn't already have one it's probably not necessary but it would make your ar pistol a little more pistol like since there aren't many stocks you can attach to one of these tubes now at the beginning i did mention that a lot of people myself included originally considered these ar pistols and similar guns to be novelties and range toys i have been rethinking that opinion recently and a lot of credit for that goes to rhett newmayer most of you guys probably don't know rhett but he has become one of my favorite outside the box thinkers in the shooting world he and i have had some conversations about a technique that he came up with for effectively running stockless shotguns like the mossberg shockwave more recently he has taken some of those same principles and modified them a little bit to get some pretty impressive performance out of an ar pistol without a brace you can see more on his youtube channel at demonstrated concepts llc basically his ar technique is a combination of stabilizing the gun with tension from a two-point sling and getting a firm cheek weld on the buffer tube no contact with his shoulder rhett can run his 10 and a half inch 556 ar pistol that way almost as well as he can do it with a shoulder stock now i have tried that with this gun and it hasn't been quite that effective for me um but a lot of that has to do with this being a five inch gun with more muzzle movement upward and there's just not that much space on this forend to get a good grip an eight inch or longer barrel would probably be a little easier to control but still it is the most viable technique i have seen for running an ar pistol without a brace or a stock on it a couple of downsides this technique is dependent on having both a sling and a buffer tube or some other kind of receiver extension that means it may not work very well with non-ar pistols it's also not going to work as well if you're in a situation where you don't have time to put on your sling i have tried this with just the cheek weld and with just the sling and i wasn't super impressed with the results either way they were much slower than the combination of both sling and cheek well i've also tried the old school single point sling method that technique relies on a similar principle where you extend the gun out to get tension on the sling as a way to stabilize a stockless gun i believe it was first developed around compact stockless submachine guns like the mp5k with this ar it actually worked quite a bit better than i was expecting it was not bad as a means of mitigating recoil but it was really difficult to get the sights to track in any kind of predictable pattern the dots kind of going all over the plate all over the place that's where the cheek weld on the buffer tube is really helpful it keeps your eye in a consistent position relative to the sights but if your gun doesn't have a buffer tube i think the single point sling technique is probably worth a try i hope at least some of that was helpful for you guys if you think you learned something do me a favor and mash that thumbs up button leave a nice comment and if you haven't done it already please [Music] subscribe [Music] you

Channel: Lucky Gunner Ammo

Views: 541,905

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Id: 0EjkIBD3Vrs

Length: 21min 30sec (1290 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/voiderest]

Opinions on policy aside it's import to know the laws in your area so you don't accidentally make yourself a felon.

At one point the ATF would have a problem with braces if they got shouldered. Then now a vertical grip is very much a problem on a pistol but currently some kinds of grips are approved.

It's worth it to also pay attention when things change since the ATF does change it's mind and local laws do change sometimes.

[u/OmarLittleFinger]

Makes perfect sense!

[u/OmarLittleFinger]

Here is a question. Hickock45 just posted a video using a pistol ar shoulder mounted. Is it still illegal according to the atf?

[u/nhart99]

I’m pretty happy I’m 5 years out of the firearm industry. Lots of people going to counters for advice when this does such a better job breaking it down. Just play it on loop at the tactical counter...