Comment on FR Doc # 2026-08917

Clarifying Delivery to a Common or Contract Carrier When Transporting Firearms I am submitting this comment in strong support of the proposed rule, and I would urge the Bureau to adopt the broadest possible reading of individual liberty available within the statutory text as it finalizes this regulation. The right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental constitutional right, not a privilege granted by the government and revocable at its convenience. Any regulation that touches on the ability of a law abiding citizen to travel with a firearm must be read narrowly against the government and broadly in favor of the individual. The interpretation adopted in United States v. Hartzog inverted that presumption. It treated a citizen's mere possession of a firearm on his own person, something he never surrendered to anyone, as if he had voluntarily transferred it to a stranger. That reading turned an ordinary constitutionally protected act into a federal felony through nothing more than a strained inference. A citizen should never have to guess whether exercising a right recognized by the Constitution itself will result in criminal prosecution. Vague or expansive criminal statutes chill the exercise of fundamental rights, and the government bears the burden of drafting and interpreting its regulations so that citizens can know with confidence what conduct is lawful. This proposed rule finally does that, and I support it without reservation. I also strongly support the provision excluding municipal transit, taxis, and rideshare vehicles from the definition of common or contract carrier. A citizen exercising a constitutional right should never be placed in criminal jeopardy because a mode of transportation happens to offer no mechanism for providing notice. The government does not get to criminalize a right by pointing to the absence of a bureaucratic procedure it never made available in the first place. I would go further than the proposed rule does, and encourage ATF to state plainly, in the final rule and its supplementary information, that the exception for direct personal control should be construed liberally in every case of genuine ambiguity, so that citizens traveling in good faith are never made examples of on the strength of a technicality. I would also ask ATF to resist any temptation, now or in future rulemakings, to read section 922(e) or any adjacent provision of the Gun Control Act in a way that requires a citizen to disclose the presence of a firearm to any party who is not directly and specifically owed that notice by the plain text of the statute. A citizen's decision to carry a firearm for his own lawful protection is his own business, and mandatory disclosure requirements beyond what Congress actually wrote function as a de facto registration and surveillance scheme, which raises serious concerns under both the Second and Fourth Amendments. Nothing in this proposed rule requires that outcome, and I would ask the Bureau to confirm expressly that the final rule does not open the door to any future requirement of that kind. Finally, I would urge ATF, in finalizing this rule, to treat the correction of the Hartzog interpretation as compelled by the Constitution itself and not merely as a discretionary policy choice tied to a particular administration's deregulatory priorities. Individual liberty should not depend on which executive order happens to be in effect. A regulation that restores citizens to the plain and correct reading of the statute is not a favor granted to them. It is the government fulfilling its obligation not to exceed the authority Congress actually gave it. I thank the Bureau for proposing this correction and urge it to finalize the rule promptly, with the liberty protective reading described above made explicit wherever possible.