Rare Breed Triggers earned its place in the history of the modern gun-rights movement. For years, the company fought the federal government’s attempt to redefine Forced Reset Triggers as machineguns and erase them from the marketplace without an act of Congress.
In July 2024, the Northern District of Texas concluded that the FRTs before it were not machineguns under federal law and rejected ATF’s contrary position. That was a major defeat for administrative gun control and a major victory for every American who believes federal agencies must obey the laws Congress actually wrote.
The Trump Justice Department then reached a settlement resolving the government’s litigation with Rare Breed and the gun-rights plaintiffs. The federal government agreed not to enforce federal machinegun restrictions against qualifying FRTs operating within the agreement’s parameters and agreed to return qualifying devices it had seized or received through voluntary surrender.
Rare Breed agreed to several conditions, including restrictions involving handgun FRTs and certain patent-enforcement efforts. In practical terms, the settlement ended the federal government’s machinegun campaign against qualifying rifle FRTs, although state prohibitions remained a separate question.
Texas Gun Rights has no interest in rewriting that history. Rare Breed spent millions of dollars fighting a federal government with effectively unlimited resources and survived an effort that threatened the existence of its business. Gun owners benefited from Rare Breed’s willingness to fight when surrender would have been cheaper and easier. Credit is due and Texas Gun Rights gives it without qualification.
But gratitude isn’t immunity from scrutiny. The victory didn’t belong solely to Rare Breed, its shareholders, or its patent-holding affiliate. It belonged to the citizens whose rights were threatened, the organizations that fought beside Rare Breed, and the constitutional principle that administrative agencies can’t invent crimes through interpretation. A constitutional victory for lawful firearms innovation should produce more lawful firearms innovation, not a government-favored gatekeeper controlling who may participate in it.
Rare Breed Has Every Reason to Be Angry
Rare Breed’s anger is understandable. According to its president, Lawrence DeMonico, federal litigation cost the company millions of dollars, depleted its finances, and kept it from enforcing patent rights while an injunction remained over the business.
This was not an abstract regulatory dispute. ATF demanded that Rare Breed stop production and surrender its inventory, and federal agents later executed a search warrant at one of the company’s manufacturing partners in Utah.
During those years, the forced-reset market expanded, new technologies appeared, and other companies made money while Rare Breed was fighting for survival. Some participants were competitors, some may have been infringers, and some were undoubtedly counterfeiters or opportunists.
A valid patent is property, and intellectual property rights don’t disappear because the underlying product involves firearms. Actual counterfeiters shouldn’t receive protection merely because they sell products that gun owners happen to like.
Rare Breed shouldn’t be expected to spend millions defending its existence and then abandon every legitimate legal right it possesses. But a patent protects the claims the patent actually contains, not an entire market, an abstract function, or every later technology that produces a broadly similar result.
The scale of the current campaign is what changes the conversation. By July 2026, Bloomberg Law had identified at least 131 patent lawsuits filed by Rare Breed and ABC IP since the May 2025 settlement. That number doesn’t prove any particular lawsuit is improper, but it makes public scrutiny unavoidable. When litigation reaches that scale, the question is no longer merely whether a patent owner has the right to sue, but what the cumulative effect of those lawsuits is doing to an entire lawful firearms market.
Litigation on this scale does more than test patent claims. It reaches inventors, manufacturers, rifle companies, distributors, retailers, membership platforms, individual business owners, and eventually their families. Many defendants must spend heavily before a judge ever interprets a disputed claim or decides whether the asserted patent is valid. Rare Breed knows better than almost anyone that litigation can damage or destroy a business without the plaintiff ever obtaining a final judgment.
The Atrius Dispute Is Not a Simple Counterfeit Case
One of the most important disputes involves Austin-based Atrius Development Group and its Forced Reset Selector. Atrius maintains that its selector-based system is technologically distinct from the inventions claimed in Rare Breed’s patents, while Rare Breed and ABC IP contend that the product infringes their patent portfolio.
Those are disputed technical and legal questions that must be decided through evidence, claim construction, and ultimately, the courts. Texas Gun Rights will not pretend that either side has already won a case that remains unresolved.
Atrius’s court filing doesn’t merely announce that it dislikes Rare Breed’s patents. It identifies specific claim limitations that Atrius says are absent from the Selector, including claimed locking-member and cam arrangements, and alleges that the firearm’s disconnector continues to catch the hammer during operation.
Atrius seeks declarations of non-infringement and invalidity and contends that one asserted patent is unenforceable because of inequitable conduct during prosecution. Those remain allegations, but they are substantive patent defenses rather than a refusal to recognize intellectual property as a concept.
Atrius goes further and alleges that material prior art was withheld from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, including the Tommy Triggers FRT-15-3MD, Rare Breed’s publicly demonstrated FRT-15E3, and Hoffman Tactical’s Super Safety.
Rare Breed’s own 2022 complaint against Tommy Triggers described both a three-position FRT-15-3MD and Rare Breed’s planned three-position FRT-15E3 before the later patent issued. These accusations are contested and have not been adjudicated. But it’s backwards to treat disputed patents as instruments of federal public safety policy before their validity and enforceability have been fully tested.
The original litigation pattern also matters. Atrius’s corrected complaint identified nine lawsuits Rare Breed and ABC IP had filed against Atrius customers and resellers while not suing Atrius itself. Atrius alleges those suits disrupted customer relationships, imposed litigation costs, damaged its reputation, and forced the same underlying dispute into multiple courts across the country.
Patent law permits customer suits under appropriate circumstances, but gun owners are entitled to ask why the campaign began at the vulnerable edges of the distribution network instead of proceeding directly against the company whose technology was actually in dispute.
The campaign later reached additional links in the Atrius commercial ecosystem. On June 23, Rare Breed and ABC IP sued One Horse and Jeremy Hammons over their involvement with rifles using the Atrius technology. On July 21, Rare Breed, ABC IP, and RBTM sued Firearms Direct Club, Kimberly Smith, and Taylor Spears in Florida. On August 6, Rare Breed and ABC IP sued ShaloTek and two of its principals in Georgia.
There’s another aspect of this campaign that deserves to be described plainly: wives have been named as defendants. When a patent dispute between firearms businesses expands to naming the spouses of the men involved, the obvious question is what legitimate patent-enforcement purpose that serves.
Whatever legal theory Rare Breed may eventually offer for including them, from the outside it looks less like protecting an invention and more like maximizing personal pressure on the people Rare Breed has chosen to sue. In the view of Texas Gun Rights, dragging wives into a commercial patent war as an apparent instrument of intimidation is cowardly and beneath a company that earned the respect of this community by standing up to intimidation itself.
That matters because litigation pressure isn’t confined to the corporation whose name appears on the first page of a complaint. Naming owners and family members personally sends a message that the fight can follow defendants beyond their businesses and into their private lives. It increases fear, expense, and pressure to capitulate regardless of whether the underlying infringement theory ultimately survives. Rare Breed spent years telling gun owners, correctly, that overwhelming legal pressure can itself become a weapon when the party applying it has deeper pockets and greater leverage.
Texas Gun Rights has personal relationships with several of the people and businesses now being sued. Kimberly Smith and Taylor Spears, owners of Firearms Direct Club, are friends of this organization, and ShaloTek also has close ties to people within our community. We disclose those relationships because readers deserve transparency, not because friendship decides patent infringement. Personal relationships don’t answer the legal questions, and no court has yet resolved the central dispute over whether the Atrius technology infringes the patents Rare Breed is asserting.
This is precisely why the Second Amendment community should pay attention to the method as well as the merits. Sue an actual counterfeiter. Prove infringement against an actual infringer. Protect a valid patent to the full extent the law permits. But sprawling litigation designed to put maximum pressure on companies, owners, sellers, and their families begins to look very different from the principled defense of a specific invention.
Rare Breed knows what it feels like when litigation becomes the punishment. It knows what it feels like when an adversary with enormous resources can threaten a business, its employees, its customers, and the people who depend upon it before the merits are finally decided. That experience should produce restraint, not imitation. The company that survived lawfare should be particularly careful about using the machinery of litigation in ways that look like lawfare against everyone else.
The Settlement Doesn’t Explain Everything
Paragraph 9 of the federal settlement deserves careful attention. It requires Rare Breed and certain related parties to use reasonable efforts to seek prohibitory injunctions under U.S. Patent No. 10,514,223 when they possess a good-faith argument that an accused FRT falls within that patent’s scope. It does not declare every competing forced reset product infringing. It does not order Rare Breed to sue every designer, manufacturer, retailer, customer, spouse, and individual associated with the broader market.
That distinction matters. The mandatory efforts provision centered on the ’223 patent, not every patent Rare Breed or ABC IP might possess now or obtain later. In the Hoffman action, for example, Rare Breed asserted the ’247, ’784, and expired ’723 patents while expressly stating that the ’223 patent was not being asserted in that case. The settlement therefore cannot be treated as a blanket federal command explaining the entire scope of the litigation campaign.
The Justice Department nevertheless framed Rare Breed’s patent enforcement as part of the settlement’s public safety architecture. That should make every Second Amendment advocate profoundly uncomfortable. Patent law exists to protect genuine inventions and encourage innovation, not to provide federal firearms regulators with a substitute mechanism for restricting lawful products. Once patent enforcement becomes part of a federal strategy to reduce the availability of firearms technology, this stops being an ordinary commercial dispute.
Rare Breed may respond that it accepted the settlement under extraordinary pressure and is merely doing what the federal government required. That may explain part of the company’s conduct and should temper simplistic accusations of betrayal. But pressure doesn’t eliminate agency, especially after the immediate federal threat has passed. Rare Breed still chooses which defendants to sue, which patents to assert, which remedies to request, which cases to settle, and how aggressively to use litigation against businesses whose technology remains genuinely disputed.
The remedies Rare Breed has requested elsewhere also deserve scrutiny. In its Hoffman complaint, Rare Breed sought preliminary relief that included barring Hoffman and related parties from discussing the patent claims and causes of action during the pendency of the case.
A gun-rights movement built on opposition to federal censorship and administrative abuse should be deeply uncomfortable with a firearms company asking a court to restrict public discussion of a major firearms dispute. Patent enforcement should protect legitimate inventions, not become a mechanism for silencing criticism of the patent holder or its litigation strategy.
ATF Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
In January, 2026, the United States filed a Statement of Interest in Rare Breed and ABC IP’s litigation against Hoffman Tactical. The government stated that ATF had an interest in “limiting the sale and distribution of FRTs.” It further argued that successful private patent enforcement could support ATF’s public safety efforts if those cases resulted in injunctions restricting third party FRT activity. Those are not words being placed in ATF’s mouth by its critics.
Read that again.
ATF has an interest in limiting the sale and distribution of FRTs. The same federal agency that spent years trying to classify these devices as machineguns openly acknowledged an interest in private litigation that could reduce their availability. The government may have changed legal vehicles, but its desired market outcome is difficult to miss.
The government didn’t order Rare Breed to sue Atrius, One Horse, Firearms Direct Club, ShaloTek, or every other defendant caught in the campaign. Nor did it take a final position on whether Rare Breed would ultimately prove infringement in every case. But it expressly identified successful patent enforcement as something that could advance ATF’s continuing interest in limiting FRT distribution.
That admission alone should set off every alarm in the Second Amendment community.
ATF tried to restrict Forced Reset Triggers through federal firearms law. The Texas court rejected its position, and the Trump Justice Department abandoned the government’s appeals through settlement. ATF then appeared in private patent litigation and argued that injunctions obtained through patent law could advance its interest in limiting FRT distribution. The objective remained substantially the same even though the legal vehicle had changed.
This is the line the gun-rights community can’t permit the government to cross without opposition. When a federal agency loses the authority to suppress a lawful firearms technology directly, it shouldn’t be allowed to pursue substantially the same market outcome indirectly through private litigation.
Changing the caption from United States v. Rare Breed to Rare Breed v. Private Citizen doesn’t magically transform restriction into freedom. A victory over gun control can’t become a business model for gun control by contract.
To be precise, this doesn’t make every Rare Breed lawsuit illegitimate. Some defendants may ultimately be found to have infringed valid patent claims, and some products may be straightforward copies rather than independent inventions. Actual counterfeiting, trademark deception, and deliberate copying remain proper subjects for litigation. But once ATF identifies private injunctions as a useful method for limiting lawful FRT distribution, every such case deserves greater scrutiny from the Second Amendment community.
The Second Amendment Standard Must Come First
The Second Amendment isn’t a licensing agreement between the federal government and one approved vendor. It protects a living ecosystem of citizens, inventors, machinists, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, gunsmiths, trainers, and owners. A right to keep and bear arms becomes fragile when government can eliminate the tools, components, businesses, and commercial channels necessary to exercise it. The practical strength of the right therefore depends upon lawful access, competition, redundancy, and continuous innovation.
The strongest defense against the next hostile administration is decentralization. America needs more firearms designers, more manufacturers, more domestic production capacity, more distribution channels, and more lawful technologies that can’t be extinguished by one injunction, one raid, or one bureaucratic interpretation. Decentralization makes the firearms community resilient because no single corporation, regulator, or court case can control the entire field. A government-favored chokepoint is the opposite of Second Amendment maximization.
Patent rights can coexist with that principle. They protect specific inventions described by specific claims for a limited period, and courts should enforce those claims when infringement is proven. They don’t confer ownership over an abstract result or over every technology that produces a similar result through a different mechanism. No company should be treated as holding a federal franchise over the entire concept of forced-reset operation.
Competition matters to the ordinary gun owner. It lowers prices, improves quality, creates alternative supply chains, rewards better engineering, and forces every manufacturer to continue earning the customer’s business. Litigation at industrial scale can reverse those benefits before a court ever decides the merits. Small businesses often settle, stop selling, or abandon development because they can’t afford to spend millions of dollars proving they were right.
Innovation matters even more. Every new design teaches the industry something. Every new manufacturer creates another source of supply. And every successful workaround makes the firearms ecosystem harder for government to extinguish.
The Second Amendment is strongest when lawful technology proliferates faster than government can suppress it. Our objective should be a thousand flowers blooming, not one company deciding which flowers have permission to grow.
This is why Texas Gun Rights won’t substitute corporate loyalty for constitutional principle. We aren’t loyal to Rare Breed, Atrius, Hoffman, ShaloTek, or any other individual company. We will praise each of them when they advance the right to keep and bear arms, and we will criticize each of them when their conduct threatens the broader freedom and resilience of the firearms community.
Companies come and go. The principle remains.
Rare Breed Still Has a Choice
Rare Breed doesn’t need to abandon legitimate patent enforcement. It can focus its fire on clear copying, counterfeit products, deceptive branding, and technologies that actually practice the claims it owns. It can create licensing or design-around channels for independent innovators instead of making every manufacturer, retailer, owner, and associated individual defend a federal lawsuit. And it can start by leaving wives and families out of commercial patent disputes unless there is a genuine, independently supportable claim against them.
Rare Breed can also publicly reject ATF’s attempt to characterize its private lawsuits as instruments of federal gun-control policy. It can say that its patents exist to protect inventions, not to help the federal government reduce the availability of lawful firearms technology. It can tell ATF that Rare Breed fought for the freedom of Americans to own FRTs, not for the privilege of becoming the government’s preferred supplier of them. That statement would carry enormous weight precisely because of what Rare Breed endured.
That wouldn’t be surrender. It would be leadership. The company that proved ATF can’t rewrite the federal machinegun statute is uniquely positioned to say that ATF also can’t use patent law as a substitute for authority it doesn’t have. Rare Breed should say that plainly.
The Justice Department and ATF should withdraw from this experiment in proxy regulation. Patent courts exist to determine validity, infringement, damages, and traditional equitable relief, not to administer a national firearms policy Congress never enacted. If Congress wants to prohibit a category of firearm technology, it must pass a law and answer to the voters. The executive branch can’t be allowed to manufacture substantially the same result through settlements, private litigation, and government-supported injunctions.
Rare Breed beat the ATF. That victory should produce more lawful designs, more American manufacturers, more affordable products, more competition, and more freedom for gun owners. It shouldn’t end with one company standing at the gate while the same federal agency it defeated points toward everyone who remains outside. The Second Amendment is maximized when lawful citizens and lawful innovation flourish, not when government power is merely transferred from a regulator to a private litigant.
Texas Gun Rights will continue to give Rare Breed credit for the battle it won. We will also continue asking hard questions about what has followed that victory. We will oppose gun control whether it arrives through legislation, regulation, prosecution, settlement, or private litigation enlisted as a policy substitute. Our loyalty isn’t to a corporation, a manufacturer, a patent holder, or the ATF.
Our loyalty is to the right to keep and bear arms.
Chris McNutt is president of Texas Gun Rights.