A group of Republican lawmakers was joined by veterans on Capitol Hill to call out the Biden Administration over the new ATF rules regarding stabilizing braces.
United States Representatives Richard Hudson (Nc), Steve Scalise (La), and Mike Bost (Il) meet up with a group of veterans for a press conference on Capitol Hill. The press conference aimed to call out the Biden Administration for the new rules on pistol braces/stabilizing braces coming out of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Lawmakers stood alongside veterans and denounced the rule changes on the grounds that they not only threaten the 2nd Amendment but they jeopardize the ability of disabled veterans to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights.
It has been stated before that this proposed rule change by the ATF will affect many of America’s disabled veterans. The point of this press conference was to bring this more awareness to this issue.
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“The ATF proposal could hurt thousands of law-abiding, gun-owning veterans simply because they use a stabilizing brace,” said Bost, the senior Republican on the House Veterans Affairs Committee. “Disabled veterans have given their country enough. The last thing they should be subject to is absurd fines and government overreach.”
Among those who spoke at the event was retired U.S. Army veteran Rick Cicero. Injured in 2010 by an IED in Afghanistan that caused significant damage to his right leg and right arm, Cicero subsequently helped design the first stabilizing braces with fellow paratrooper Alex Bosco and wrote the initial training guidelines with Sig Sauer Academy to use them.
“Stabilizing braces gave me the ability to get back out and shoot things that I never expected I would be able to again and my life changed drastically,” said Cicero. “Since then, I have been traveling across the country teaching veterans how to shoot again. That brace is the foundation of everything I do because I can take someone who has limited strength in their hands or is missing digits and give them confidence and the skills and capability to grasp a firearm again and get them back to the things that were such a part of their life.”
