NBC: DOJ Settles Suit, Will Allow the Sale of Forced Reset Triggers and Return All FRTs ATF Has Seized

Under the settlement, the Justice Department “will bind itself, in perpetuity, not to enforce the machinegun ban against any device that functions like forced reset triggers,” one person familiar with the settlement told NBC News. “ATF must also return thousands of seized forced reset triggers to their previous owners. In other words, machine guns will soon become legal to possess and purchase, and the federal government will flood the market with these devices.”

Some of the most popular versions of these devices are made by a company called Rare Breed Triggers, which was sued by the ATF in a separate case. That case will have to be dropped as part of the settlement, one of the people familiar with it said.

Proponents of the devices dispute that they turn regular guns into machine guns. But the ATF determined that the devices allow a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle to fire as fast as a military M-16 in automatic mode, according to court records.

Since the forced reset trigger devices will not be considered firearms, they can be purchased anonymously, without a background or age check. Machine guns have been mostly illegal in the United States since 1934, a notion that even gun rights groups have come to accept.

The effort to ban forced reset triggers originated in the first Trump Administration, at the same time the ATF also banned bump stocks, another device that enabled rapid trigger pulls that mimic the firing rate of a machine gun. The gunman in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting killed 58 people while firing from his hotel room window using bump stocks.

The Supreme Court ruled by a 6-3 margin last year that the bump stock ban was unlawful after the majority concluded the devices did not meet the definition of a machine gun because they didn’t allow for automatic fire with the single pull of a trigger.

— NBC’s Ken Dilanian at X