While there's no question that dusky shark populations are in bad shape and can use any help that NMFS can give, it's good that NMFS is recrafting this particular regulatory proposal, because what they put out the first time just didn't make much sense; in fact, it strained credibility to the point that it provided ammunition to those who want to impugn even the agency's most rational efforts to conserve and rebuild fish populations.  It is already illegal for anyone fishing in US waters to kill and deep dusky sharks.  What the new regulations would do is establish a new 96" minimum size for ALL sharks, regardless of species, retained by anglers, on the theory that anglers might not know how to identify sharks too well, and so might accidentally kill an immature dusky thinking that it was, perhaps, a shortfin mako or common thresher.  Now, such thinking might make sense if NMFS was only talking about a size limit for the Carcharhinidae, which is the family of sharks that duskies belong to.  Many of them look more-or-less alike (for example, anglers in my area frequently confuse duskies and sandbars), they share a reproductive strategy that makes them particularly vulnerable to overfishing, and a few of the species or in a bit of trouble themselves.  Misidentification is clearly possible (and we can even throw tiger sharks into the mix; at a Montauk tournament a couple of years ago, a participant illegally killed a dusky and brought it to the scales, claiming that he thought that it was a tiger, although the two don't really look alike--unless, perhaps, there are thousands of dollars of prize money out there to skew perceptions) within the family, so the rule as originally proposed might make sense there.  But the "pelagic" shark category, as defined by NMFS, should not be included in the mix.  No one who does not require a seeing-eye dog is going to confuse a long-tailed thresher or sleek, blue mako or porbeagle (or the long, tubular cobalt form of a blue shark, although those are seldom retained) for the chunky, greyish-brown dusky shark, and to suggest that someone might places the agency's management competence in real doubt.  If NMFS thinks that makos or threshers need stricter management (and porbeagles most certainly do), they can issue a species-specific regulation.  But this one just doesn't make sense. 
For the record, I've been fishing for sharks since the 1970s, and have been a participant in the NMFS Apex Predator Tagging Program since that very first day; I've killed--or had killed on my boat--a dozen or less sharks in that time, the last a thresher that exhausted itself beyond any reasonable hope of survival back in 2000, so I'm not arguing against this because I want to kill sharks.  Instead, I argued against the original measure because I want to see NMFS adopt measures that will not only help depleted fish stocks, but will also stand up to court challenges which the folks who DO want to kill sharks will inevitably bring.  And I also don't want to hand any low-hanging fruit to the fools that make a living by bashing the only agency and the only law that has any hope of restoring America's marine fish populations.