A federal district court judge in Texas has struck down the efforts of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to ban a rapid-fire device known as a forced reset trigger (FRT).
In a 64-page ruling on July 23, Judge Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued a summary judgment vacating an ATF ruling classifying FRTs as machineguns.
O’Connor further declared the ATF’s classification of FRTs was unlawful and enjoined them from taking civil or criminal legal action or warning notices against people purchasing or possessing these FRTs. The judge also ordered the ATF to return, within 30 days, any FRTs it has seized from manufacturers, resellers, or individual owners.
The judge also ordered the ATF to issue remedial letters, correcting a prior mailing campaign warning FRT owners that possessing those devices is illegal.
The National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) led this legal challenge against the ATF’s rule on FRTs. The organization helped represent Rare Breed Triggers, the developer of an FRT design.
The gun rights advocacy group had argued the ATF’s enforcement actions concerning FRTs entailed an arbitrary interpretation of existing federal law restricting access to machine guns. The plaintiffs specifically argued that FRTs fell outside the actual statutory definition of a machine gun, as codified in federal law: “Any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily
restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”
The plaintiffs argued FRTs function differently from machineguns, as defined in federal law. Rather than achieving rapid fire from a single trigger pull, the FRT device instead mechanically resets the trigger from the fired position back to the unfired position, enabling an operator to more rapidly articulate the trigger while still only firing a single shot per trigger pull.
The plaintiffs included in their lawsuit, a video exhibit demonstrating the trigger articulation of an FRT.
The gun rights activists also included a video exhibit of a machinegun trigger, firing in a side-by-side frame with an FRT, for comparison.
ttorneys representing the ATF and the U.S. Department of Justice insisted in their filings that FRTs meet the federal statutory definition of a machinegun. They said they were able to determine that an FRT can fire multiple shots with a single trigger function by employing a “zip-tie test” whereby a zip-tie was wrapped around an FRT and a pistol grip and gradually tightened. The ATF said it conducted this test multiple times and repeatedly found an FRT-equipped rifle with a ten-round magazine loaded, was able to fire multiple rounds before encountering malfunctions or expending the loaded ammunition.
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In his judgment, O’Connor found the ATF’s zip-tie examination to be insufficient evidence, writing that the elasticity of the plastic zip-tie would still allow for sufficient movement to allow for a trigger reset.
“All this test establishes is that the trigger need not move to its most rearward position. It can still reset from sufficient rearward pressure and forward movement propelled by the stretched zip tie. In other words, the zip tie test fails to demonstrate that a single function of the trigger does not otherwise not how the user or a zip tip pulls the trigger,” the judge wrote.
O’Connor’s decision applies to the named plaintiffs represented in the case, Patrick Carey, Travis Speegle, and James Wheeler; organizational plaintiffs NAGR and Texas Gun Rights, Inc. (TGR); and “downstream customers” of the two organizational plaintiffs.
NAGR and Rare Breed Triggers president Lawrence DeMonico celebrated the court win on Tuesday evening.
“We freakin won guys,” DeMonico said in a video statement following the judgment.
The Rare Breed Trigger’s president called O’Connor’s summary judgment “64 pages of glorious reading.” Still, he predicted the ATF will appeal the case and continue to pursue legal challenges against access to these trigger devices.
The DOJ and ATF have yet to comment publicly about the Tuesday ruling.
The district court’s summary judgment comes just over a month after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Garland v Cargill to strike down an ATF ban on another rapid-fire firearm device known as a bump stock.
This article was originally published by FreeBase News and is reprinted with permission.
