A lot of bills get proposed that never seem to go anywhere. It’s a shame, too, because some of those can and should have become federal law. National reciprocity and the Hearing Protection Act both should have already been enacted and signed by the president, thus making it so those with a carry permit could carry in any state in the nation as well as being able to buy a suppressor over the counter at a gun store.

That should have happened, but it didn’t.

However, the Advocates for Self Government posted about another gun law that really should be passed.

Kansas Congressman Roger Marshall’s introduction of the Home Defense and Competitive Shooting Act of 2019 could move well-established federal gun control laws in a pro-gun direction.

This bill would amend provisions of the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) that impose extra restrictions on short-barreled rifle ownership. Short-barreled rifles constitute those with barrels shorter than 16″ long or those with a total length less than 26″. The NFA mandates that short-barreled rifle owners register their firearms with the federal government, as well as pay a $200 excise tax for each short-barreled firearm they register.

If the Home Defense and Competitive Shooting Act of 2019 is signed into law, these additional requirements would be eliminated and short-barreled rifles would be subject to the same rules as semi-automatic rifles.

Further, the legislation would have the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives destroy all current short-barreled rifle records within 365 days of the law going into effect. Consequently, information about short-barreled rifle owners would be wiped off the federal firearms database.

Yep. This looks like something that really should be law…

…but won’t be.

The Advocates note that the current congressional makeup, this bill has an uphill battle at best. They also note that even if it made it out of the House, the Senate isn’t a lock either since Republicans have been doing a lot of lip service toward the Second Amendment in recent years, but done little to expand gun rights when they had the chance.

All of that is true.

It’s also very unfortunate. You see, the anti-gunners who will block this will also tell us that we need to adopt the kind of gun control laws they have in other places. Yet what they fail to understand is that suppressors are mandatory in some parts of Europe and short-barreled rifles are legal in Canada. In other words, the only part of the NFA that seems to be universal is the restriction on fully-automatic weapons.

Yet despite that, they won’t take a step back and think, “Hmmm, maybe it’s a good idea to retract some of this NFA nonsense.”

Instead, we get fearmongering about how suppressors somehow make it impossible to hear the shots coming from a mass shooter–this despite Virginia Beach telling us explicitly that you actually can hear the shots from a suppressed firearm–and vilifying anything to do with guns in general.

The Advocates asked if gun deregulation was coming to Washington. Frankly, that’s a dumb question we all already know the answer to. Especially without some significant changes in the House come November.