4/26/2023 - ATF Director Steven Dettelbach at Congressional House Judiciary Committee Hearing and Rep. Thomas Massie questioning regarding various topics including pistol braces. The following is an exact quote from the AFT Director regarding simple compliance of the brace rule without registration. Basically he stated from the quote as long as you separate the brace from the pistol and keep them apart, you are in compliance. My question is, can his public testimony be followed verbatim or is this just simplification to get congress to simply accept their overreach and that if what he stated is done, then there is no violation of ATF rule, or is compliance via non-registration vastly more complicate. He clearly stated compliance is simple and stated in his quote to congress.
Quote: ATF Director Steven Dettelbach (verbatim)
“There can also be detachment, so in other words, we don’t count, we don’t, that’s not for us to regulate, if some simply, we wrote the rule to make it easy to comply with. If somebody just at their home detaches the weapon from the brace, keeps them apart, they do not have to register anything, they can keep the brace, they can keep the business end of the gun”.
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So… you can have it, so long as you never use it?
Back to that joke about cutting the 2nd Amendment in half, it sounds like. You can keep your arms, but you can’t bear them.
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How bout I keep them together and only use them when practicing gun safety. 
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What a stupid piece of testimony. A brace is legal so long as it’s never attached to a firearm.
Bear in mind that we (taxpayers) fund the Director’s salary, benefits and pension.
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Welcome to the community @Paul516
The ATF has proven time and time again that you can NOT trust anything they say or write. They will enforce their interpretation of the law however they see fit and what they interpret is subject to change on a day to day basis at their whim.
For several years they released written guidance stating that braces were perfectly legal. Now they say all the people who legally bought them under that guidance are felons. Dettleback has admitted that he is unqualified to define firearm types. It is clear he is unqualified for his position. So I would not trust a word he says. But you could use his quote and maybe even call him as a hostile witness at your trial.
The real answer is that no one really knows exactly what people need to do to comply with this ruling. All any of us can do is make our best effort to interpret and comply with their ruling and hope the ATF doesn’t show up at our doors with an assault team.
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