The Washington Times reports that there’s some confusion between gun manufacturers and the ATF.
“ATF regulations for the manufacture of weapons are often unclear,” the paper reports, “leading to reliance on a secretive system” where proposed guns are submitted for approval one by one and “judgements are private and, it turns out, sometimes contradictory.”
The approval process is known as “letter rulings,” according to the Washington Times, and a major critic of the process is former assistant director of criminal investigations for the ATF Robert E. Sanders, who said that letter rulings are often “definitely contradictory and inconsistent,” though still necessary because regulations are ill-defined.
“It is hard to tell what ATF wants you to do without submitting your product and asking for a letter ruling,” he said. “You can’t tell what the agency has said in the past to others, because those letter rulings are generally secret. How could somebody know how to comply with the law?”
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