Seems they are trying to come up with some sensible way of regulating receivers. I think they are failing. Pretty obviously they are a firearm, but it seems ATF wants to treat them as a pistol in some cases, but a rifle in another. ATF often gets accused of making things up as they go, and that criticism is not without justification. But don’t forget that Congress really holds much of the blame for drafting a body of law that’s poorly written and incoherent when taking as a whole. Federal bureaucracies have to make sense out of incoherent and poorly drafted bodies of law through regulations. Anyone who works in a heavily regulated industry, as I do, knows that guns are hardly the only product this applies to.
To me the real outrage is that Congress has basically conceded that it has no idea what it is doing when it makes law, and has to abrogate a great deal of lawmaking ability to “experts” in the executive branch. It shouldn’t be costitutional, but I have to admit that quite often the “experts,” and I use that in quotes deliberately, still know a hell of a lot more about the subject matter subjected to the laws and regulations than your average congress critter.
And somewhere someone is having PSH because I can mail-order that .50 BMG upper I read about over the weekend, mate it to a random AR-15 lower I have laying about that I bought as a .22 target rifle (I don’t, sad to say, have a random lower laying about, much less any caliber upper) and go shoot down airplanes WITHOUT ANYONE KNOWING!eleventy-ZOMG1
I sometimes wonder how the military carbine design space has been stunted because of the lack of civilian market (probably not too much given H und K’s policies, but still).