Yesterday, President Biden made an announcement about various administrative actions he’s taking to regulate guns. From our perspective, the totality of that narrative is pretty incoherent and part of a very big story about gun control in America, but I’m going to focus on one small part of that — pistol braces — for the sake of brevity. (The mental health aspect of the announcement is a bit more interesting and positive; I plan to cover that soon.)
A pistol brace is basically a thing that takes the place of a proper stock on a short-barreled rifle in order to sidestep the law regarding the registration of a short-barreled rifle. There are certainly a few examples of people who used a pistol brace to overcome some physical issue with their body, but they are definitely the exception.
A short-barreled rifle is a legal definition that was created as part of the 1934 National Firearms Act in the USA. It isn’t a technical or practical term — just a legal one. At the time, there was a lot of fear about gangs in big cities using Tommy guns in turf wars or against the police. These machine guns were a legitimate problem, but Hollywood dramatically exaggerated their prevalence and created fear of Tommy guns among people who were in no danger of gang violence. Most importantly, it was the fact that they were machine guns that made them effective weapons when used in high-profile murders like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
The legal definition of a short-barreled rifle in the USA is: “a shoulder-fired, rifled firearm, made from a rifle, with a barrel length of less than 16 in (41 cm) or overall length of less than 26 in (66 cm), or a handgun fitted with a buttstock and a barrel of less than 16 inches length”. Guns fitting that definition are still legal, but you have to register them with the government; that takes $200 and about 9 months to a year to accomplish.
The question, though, is: Are short-barreled rifles more dangerous to the average person than long-barreled rifles? We don’t know the answer to that question — that’s the truth. However, my guess is that they are not. Here’s why:
1. Barrel length does not significantly affect the lethality of a gun. While there is a slight difference in the velocity of a bullet from a short barrel versus a long barrel, the bullet from a short barrel is actually slower and therefore less deadly.
2. Barrel length does not significantly affect the accuracy of a gun. Every gun fires a specific ammunition cartridge, and that cartridge is designed to be effective out to some distance. At closer ranges, there’s no difference in accuracy at all between barrel lengths, but when shooting at targets that are out at the limits of the ammunition cartridge’s design, a shorter barrel will be slightly less accurate. The exact meaning of “closer ranges” would vary by cartridge but would rarely be less than 100 yards which is well beyond the distance of all but the rarest gunfights or murders. The reason rifle barrels are long is because of gunpowder technology — older powders took longer to complete their burn, so a longer barrel was required to allow the bullet to attain sufficient velocity.
3. Barrel length does not significantly affect the concealability of a gun. The concern people have about concealed firearms is that someone can produce the gun unexpectedly and quickly. Anything larger than a Glock 19, which is a medium-size handgun, is pretty hard to conceal on your person in a way that allows for quick access. A very small short-barreled rifle might have a folding stock, and that would make it a nice “backpack gun”, but a backpack gun isn’t going to be produced unexpectedly and quickly, and if a person is concealing a rifle in a container, they can use a big duffel bag, guitar case, box of long stem roses, etc.
4. Mass murderers rarely conceal the gun, and want the gun to be big. The whole motivation of the standard mass shooter is to regain the respect of society through an episode of extreme terror that creates a lasting impression of the murderer’s fearsomeness. This doesn’t work with a tiny gun. Biden pointed out that the perpetrator of one of the (many) recent mass shootings used the pistol brace workaround on the gun he used; however, this gun was still quite large and the killer did not attempt to conceal it.
I don’t want to avoid the truly important feature of the short-barreled rifle, though. That feature isn’t actually the barrel — it is the stock. A stock on a gun is what allows a person to steady it and hit what they are aiming at. Any argument stating that guns should be less accurate is a non-starter for at least a couple of reasons: 1) it is a violation of the whole point of a firearm, which is to place a bullet where the user wishes it go, and 2) a less accurate gun isn’t less dangerous generally — it’s slightly less dangerous to the intended target and slightly more dangerous to anyone else. It seems like some people are simultaneously afraid of too much accuracy in a firearm and also inaccuracy, which is often expressed as a gun “spraying” bullets.
The fact that accuracy is a core feature of a firearm is why the gun community was relatively calm about the short-lived ban on bump stocks. In case you missed it, a bump stock is a workaround for the requirement for machine guns to be registered. A side-effect of the way a bump stock works is that it makes for a relatively inaccurate machine gun.
Based on all of the above, I do not see any compelling reason to regulate short-barreled rifles. In addition, there is nothing resembling evidence to say that they should be regulated — only imagined scenarios, which I don’t think are adequate to justify legislation.
I think it is obvious that the whole purpose of the pistol brace is to circumvent the law, and I certainly agree that scofflaws are annoying. However, instead of going through all this effort to stop people from circumventing the law, we’d be better off just getting rid of the requirement for the registration of short-barreled rifles. If Democrats want to come up with better firearm laws — which is something I do agree is possible — they’re going to need to better understand the thing that they hate first.
If you’re thinking about building an AR-15 with a barrel shorter than 16″, you might be interested in this nice summary of the relevant laws by Lucky Gunner.