The impetus for the bump stock ban, of course, was the horrific 2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting that killed dozens and injured over 400 others.
This incident led to the agency assuming the legal authority it did not have to classify the devices as “machine gun” parts later that year.
The ATF took encouragement from the victory and began looking for other ways that firearms could be accessorized to make them fire faster. That in turn led to the unilateral ban on forced reset triggers (FRTs).
These are designed and manufactured so that when a gun user pulls the trigger, it is forced back into the original position — or reset — so it may be fired again. In no way does this make a weapon automatic as the trigger must be pulled another time to fire the next round.
It just alleviates a bit of time between firings because the shooter does not have to let up the pressure on their trigger finger. The trigger is reset automatically.
But even this small technological improvement is enough to set off the outrage of the anti-gun lobby. Many, including the ATF, claimed that these triggers are “conversion devices,” rendering what was a perfectly legal firearm into a “machine gun.”
In a letter sent by the ATF in March 2022 to federally licensed gun dealers, the agency spelled out its classification of firearms with the devices as machine guns that fall under far stricter federal laws.
The National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) is now filing a suit against the ATF over its ban of FRTs.
The National Association of Gun Rights v. Garland was filed in federal court in the Northern District of Texas. This is the same appellate court that ruled earlier in 2023 that bump stocks are not to be classified as machine guns in Cargill v. Garland.
FRTs hit the market in Dec. 2020 through Rare Breed Triggers. The company had the product design reviewed by firearms and legal experts before selling them. But within a month, the ATF sprang into action to prohibit the new accessories.
The agency claimed that “multiple concerned citizens” implored them to investigate FRTs. That, as could be expected, turned out not to be the case as Freedom of Information Act requests uncovered no such communications with the ATF.
But a pretense was needed, and that sufficed.
Dudley Brown, President of NAGR, plainly stated that the ATF is “harassing our friends at Rare Breed Triggers” for marketing a perfectly legal product. He declared the agency has “seized merchandise, raided homes, and generally rained terror down on the heads of law-abiding gun owners.”
Brown noted the federal government even brought civil charges onto Rare Breed Triggers to try to force them to discontinue operations. As he confirmed, “there is no dispute that the Rare Breed Triggers FRT only allows one round to be fired for each function of the trigger.”
The legal assertion is that forced reset triggers do not qualify as machine guns under the National Firearms Act definition.
Hannah Hill is the Executive Director for the National Foundation for Gun Rights, NAGR’s legal arm. She argued that if the ATF is allowed to persist in chipping away at gun rights, “we’ll soon be left with no rights at all.”
Hill added, “There should be no authority for a government agency to make rule of law unilaterally by themselves, and the courts need to recognize that.”
