One of the running jokes Star Wars fans have had for decades is how awful storm troopers are with their accuracy. To use a phrase common in the southeast, they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.

And if you’ve ever watched a Star Wars movie, you know that it’s true. Lots of shots fired, and almost no one hit.

Now, I get it, Star Wars was, according to George Lucas, designed to a be a series of movies for kids, so, you don’t want blaster effects that turn the movies into a Rambo spin-off.

Still, like so many people, I keep going back to the accuracy issue and laugh.

It appears that the Empire in the Star Wars universe noticed that was a problem, too, so, they decided to do something about that going forward. From our friends at The Babylon Bee:

Emperor Palpatine was said to be very pleased with the latest ballistics report on stormtrooper marksmanship, as the Imperial Army’s collective accuracy percentage improved dramatically after adding pistol braces to all blasters.

Again, from The Babylon Bee:

Though the ragtag group of rebels has scored a surprising number of victories in various skirmishes throughout the galaxy, even its greatest heroes acknowledged the pistol braces put them at too great of a disadvantage. “Even the Force is powerless,” Jedi Luke Skywalker said solemnly. “I can lift boulders the size of a star cruiser and I’ve mastered lightsaber combat…but expecting us to go up against pistol braces on blasters is asking the impossible.”

The article also noted that pistol braces had been banned for civilian use to give the Empire an advantage.

Now, all kidding aside (and, yes, I know that The Babylon Bee is a satire site), it’s exactly this kind of thinking that the ATF must have had too when they issued the pistol brace rule to, essentially, control and try to minimize legal availability of pistol braces.

As if pistol braces suddenly make terrible shooters deadly accurate snipers with pistols.

Sorry, that’s just not going to happen. And the ATF’s thinking under the Biden administration about pistol braces is just as flawed .

So, did the ATF borrow from Star Wars? Not that I know of.

What they did do, though, is to take on the same wrong beliefs that The Babylon Bee’s satire piece made jokes about, and if we have the Federal agency regulating firearms going around with completely wrongheaded beliefs, then, we have some work to do to get that agency either defunded and closed or, at the very least, staffed with people who know what they’re talking about instead of the clowns who decided that the pistol brace rule was a good idea.