Weaponized Regulation: How Washington Is Strangling the Firearms Industry Just One Rule Change at a Time
by Mark Maxwell
I know the people who helped build the modern firearms accessories industry. They’re not lobbyists, politicians, or suits in D.C. They’re engineers, veterans, inventors or entrepreneurs who saw a need and answered it with American ingenuity.
Some of them founded companies like SB Tactical, the industry leader in stabilizing pistol braces designed to help disabled veterans shoot more safely and accurately. Others launched Rare Breed Triggers, a company that engineered the now-infamous forced reset trigger (FRT), a product fully legal under federal law when it entered the market. Both are now under siege, not by competition, but by the federal government.
The firearms industry has always lived under scrutiny, but in recent years, it’s become a political target. Not through new laws passed by Congress, but through regulatory redefinition, a backdoor form of legislation that lacks transparency, accountability, or respect for due process.
Take the ATF’s decision to reclassify pistol braces as equivalent to short-barreled rifles after a decade of public letters, approvals, and guidance affirming their legality. With a stroke of a pen, millions of law-abiding gun owners became potential felons overnight, and companies like SB Tactical were effectively punished for following the rules.
Then came the assault on forced reset triggers, with the ATF retroactively declaring some designs to be machine guns, despite no statutory change to the National Firearms Act. Rare Breed, like others, was told to shut down or face raids, seizures, and court battles. Many of us are in the middle of those battles now. And let’s not forget the ongoing fight over bump stocks, where a regulation, not a law, was used to redefine a piece of plastic as a machine gun.
This isn’t just bureaucratic overreach. It’s a fundamental betrayal of the rule of law.
What’s worse, these arbitrary reinterpretations don’t just affect manufacturers, they affect millions of gun owners, thousands of small businesses, and an entire supply chain of machinists, engineers, and retail workers who followed every rule, paid every tax, and passed every audit. Now they’re being told they’re criminals, not for breaking the law, but for obeying it too well.
And the firearms industry isn’t the only sector being strangled by shifting definitions. Farmers have been steamrolled by the EPA’s ever-changing scope of the Clean Water Act, where a dry ditch might suddenly qualify as federally protected land. Diesel mechanics and small trucking fleets have been hit with emissions mandates they can’t afford to meet. And we’ve watched federal agencies sidestep Congress in the name of “public health,” “climate justice,” or “safety” without considering the livelihoods they destroy in the process.
This is the same playbook. The tools vary, the target shifts., but the strategy is always the same: move the goalposts, declare compliance criminal, and then use the threat of prosecution to silence resistance.
It’s not just economically devastating, it’s constitutionally corrosive.
In a republic governed by law, regulations are supposed to clarify, not redefine what the law says. The ATF, the EPA, and other alphabet agencies are not legislative bodies. They were never meant to dictate policy through executive fiat. When they do, we don’t just lose predictability in our industries, we lose trust in our institutions.
If the federal government wants to ban pistol braces, bump stocks, or forced reset triggers, it should go to Congress and make the case in public. If it can’t convince the people’s representatives, then the regulation has no place in our legal system. That’s not extremism. That’s civics 101.
Those of us fighting these battles aren’t asking for special treatment. We’re asking for clear rules, fair enforcement, and the freedom to innovate without being criminalized retroactively. Whether it’s firearms, farming, or trucking, the principle is the same: if your livelihood can be destroyed by a letter, a memo, or an unelected official’s whim, you’re not living in a free country.
We’re still in the fight. But make no mistake, the stakes are bigger than triggers, stocks or braces. This is about how policy is made, who gets to make it, and whether the American citizen still has a place in that process.
-Mark Maxwell is a Marine Corps veteran, firearms consultant, and founder of Texas based RW Arms, Ltd. He writes about tradition, liberty, and the intersection of constitutional law and American culture.