Protecting Our Kids Act
Key claim: The House-passed bill would bar most sales of certain semiautomatic guns to people under 21, ban large-capacity magazines, regulate ghost guns and bump stocks, set federal safe-storage rules, and create new gun-trafficking crimes.
Abstract
(HR7910 · 117th Congress) Protecting Our Kids Act This bill makes various changes to federal firearms laws, including to establish new criminal offenses and to expand the types of weapons and devices that are subject to regulation. Among the changes, the bill generally prohibits the sale or transfer of certain semiautomatic firearms to individuals who are under 21 years of age; establishes new federal criminal offenses for gun trafficking and related conduct; establishes a federal statutory framework to regulate ghost guns (i.e., guns without serial numbers); establishes a framework to regulate the storage of firearms on residential premises at the federal, state, and tribal levels; subjects bump stocks to regulation under federal firearms laws; generally prohibits the import, sale, manufacture, transfer, and possession of large capacity ammunition feeding devices; and requires the Department of Justice to report on the demographic data of persons who are determined to be ineligible to purchase a firearm based on a background check performed by the national instant criminal background check system. Latest action (2022-06-09): Received in the Senate.
Why this matters
The bill is one of the most comprehensive federal firearms packages to clear a chamber of Congress in recent years, and its provisions on under-21 sales, magazine capacity, ghost guns, bump stocks, safe storage, and trafficking preview the policy menu civil rights and gun-safety advocates continue to push. Its failure to advance in the Senate illustrates how enforcement of firearm-related civil safety measures remains largely dependent on state law and executive-branch rulemaking. Practically, affected groups—young adult purchasers, gun owners, victims of trafficking-sourced firearms—continue to face a patchwork of state rules rather than the federal floor the bill would have set.