<![CDATA[Rare Breed Triggers]]>

Court issues injunction on forced reset triggers case

September 6, 2023 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

Forced reset triggers do one thing. As soon as you fire the gun, it forces the trigger to reset so you can follow up with another shot very quickly.

Some people seem to think that being able to shoot quickly is a bad thing.

Unfortunately, some of those people apparently work at the ATF and now Rare Breed, a company that makes forced reset triggers, is dealing with the agency in court.

Also, unfortunately, their case had a setback on Tuesday.

The U.S. government on Tuesday won a court injunction blocking a firearms company from selling after-market triggers that let gun enthusiasts convert AR-15 style rifles into weapons that can shoot as fast as machine guns.
U.S. District Judge Nina Morrison in Brooklyn said the Department of Justice was likely to prove that the “forced-reset triggers” sold by Rare Breed Triggers LLC and its owners were illegal machine guns under federal law.
The government said rifles equipped with Rare Breed’s FRT-15 triggers were capable of firing faster than military-grade M-16 machine guns, which can fire at least 700 rounds a minute.
In a 129-page decision, Morrison said the defendants defrauded customers by saying its FRT-15s were “absolutely” legal, despite having failed to win Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives approval for their sale.
She also highlighted alleged efforts by Fargo, North Dakota-based Rare Breed to obstruct the government from tracking and confiscating the devices, including by destroying sales records and using fake names on packages sent through the mail.
“Defendants declined to seek ATF classification of the FRT-15 and instead simply assure RBT’s customers that the device was ‘legal’ precisely because they knew that allowing ATF to examine their device before bringing it to market might kill their proverbial golden goose,” the judge wrote.

Morrison, a Biden appointee, seems to simply assume that the ATF is right here, that making a gun shoot faster somehow makes it a machine gun.

One would think, however, that a federal judge would at least look up the definition of a machine gun in federal law.

From the National Firearms Act:

(b) Machinegun. The term ‘machinegun’ means 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 95 function of the trigger. The term shall also include the frame or receiver of any such weapon, any part designed and intended solely and exclusively, or combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun, and any combination of parts from which a machinegun can be assembled if such parts are in the possession or under the control of a person.

Here’s the thing, though. Forced reset triggers don’t fire multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger. It simply allows one to pull the trigger much faster.

Morrison seemingly claims that because the forced reset triggers allow one to shoot as fast as a machine gun, it should be regulated as such, but the law makes no such case.

In other words, she’s taking the ATF’s made-up crap as actual law and saying the government would likely win the case based on that made-up crap.

I fail to see how she can say such a thing, though. I’m not an attorney, mind you, but it seems rather bizarre to argue that the government will win on a case where they claim a device turns a rifle into a machine gun when the device does nothing to change the weapon in any way that meets the legal definition of a machine gun.

Then again, as a Biden appointee, it’s unlikely that Morrison is really that concerned with the actual law when it comes to restricting what ordinary Americans can own with regard to firearms and accessories.

ABC News asks if forced reset triggers are machine guns

August 21, 2023 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

Forced reset triggers weren’t really a thing when the Las Vegas shooting happened. In the wake of that tragedy, though, lawmakers considered legislation that would have caused problems for the new technology. Congress was seriously looking at a bill that would ban any kind of modification to a firearm that would allow it to shoot faster, which could have been a problem.

After all, it can be argued that a trigger with a lighter pull allows you to shoot faster.

When President Donald Trump directed the ATF to reverse its ruling on bump stocks, it seemed parts of that problem went away.

Yet forced reset triggers eventually saw a similar decision from the ATF. They don’t meet the NFA definition of a machine gun, but the ATF says they are.

Now, there’s a legal battle over this disagreement.

ABC News decided to ask if the triggers are machine guns or not.

The internet videos are alarming to some, thrilling to others: Gun enthusiasts spraying bullets from AR-15-style rifles equipped with an after-market trigger allowing them to shoot seemingly as fast as fully automatic weapons.
The forced-reset triggers so concerned the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that it ordered the company making them to halt sales only months after they began in 2020, declaring the devices illegal machine guns.
Rare Breed Triggers, founded in Florida and now based in Fargo, North Dakota, said the ATF was wrong and kept selling its FRT-15 triggers, setting the stage for a legal battle now in federal courts in New York and Texas.
The triggers are the latest rapid-fire gun accessories to draw scrutiny from government officials worried about mass shootings and police officer safety, joining bump stocks, which were banned by the Trump administration after the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 60 people, and cheap parts called auto sears that can make a pistol fire as if it were fully automatic.
“The defendants are illegally selling machine guns, plain and simple, with conversion devices that transform AR-15 type rifles into even more lethal weapons suited for battlefields, not our communities,” Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said when he sued Rare Breed in January, accusing the company of fraud.

It looks to me like they made up their minds.

Comparing forced reset triggers to bump stocks is fine with me. After all, both are devices that don’t change the functioning of the rifle itself, they just allow you to pull the trigger much faster.

But comparing them to full-auto switches–called “auto sears” here–is different. Full-auto switches don’t facilitate pulling the trigger faster. They actually do turn handguns into machine pistols, making it so a single pull of the trigger allows one to fire multiple rounds.

So yeah, it seems ABC News made up its mind already.

Moving on, though, because there’s more to see.

Both the bump stock and forced-reset legal battles involve how to apply the National Firearms Act of 1934 — a law passed in part to try to curb gangland violence — as modified in 1968 and 1986.
The law bars the public from owning machine guns, which are defined as firearms capable of firing more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single pull of a trigger, or “any part” that converts a weapon into a machine gun.

Maybe it’s just me, but I see the phrasing here as problematic. The way “any part” is included, suggests that forced reset triggers may well be included.

However, what those two words actually mean within the context of the NFA is any part that allows a weapon to fire more than one round with a single trigger pull. For example, full-auto switches would fall under this. Bump stocks and forced reset triggers don’t.

In fairness to ABC News, though, they do seem to acknowledge this.

But under the law, the key to whether a part turns a weapon into a machine gun isn’t the rate of fire, but whether or not multiple rounds can be fired with a single pull of the trigger.
Rare Breed’s owner, Kevin Maxwell, and its president, Lawrence DeMonico, both appeared in federal court in Brooklyn this month to argue their device is not a machine gun because it forces the trigger to return to the start position after each shot, so only one shot can be fired with a single “function” of the trigger.

They also acknowledge that the ATF approved another company’s forced reset trigger while going after them, as well as binary triggers being legal in most states.

Binary triggers fire once when you pull the trigger, then a second time when you release it.

Of course, ABC News doesn’t give a definitive answer, but while they acknowledge the difference between a machine gun and one equipped with a forced reset trigger, they do it later in the piece, when a lot of people would have quit reading, convinced they had a grip on what was happening.

Still, it sure seems pretty clear that these aren’t machine guns and never were.

After all, if a fast rate of fire made something a machine gun, Jerry Miculek would have to be registered with the NFA.

NAGR sues ATF over forced reset trigger ban

August 13, 2023 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

When President Donald Trump had his ATF reclassify bump stocks as machine guns, it started an avalanche of problems. After all, a bump stock doesn’t change how a gun functions. It just lets people conduct that single pull of the trigger a whole lot faster.

As a result, the ATF started looking at other things that might allow faster trigger pulls.

One example was their decision to unilaterally ban forced reset triggers.

These triggers are set up so that after a pull of said trigger, it forces the trigger back into a reset position so it can be pulled again. You still have to pull the trigger yourself, of course, but you can do that a bit faster because you don’t have to let up on the pressure being applied.

Yet forced reset triggers don’t turn firearms into machine guns, no matter what the bureaucrats claim.

Now, the National Association for Gun Rights is filing a lawsuit against the ATF over forced reset triggers.

Today, the National Association for Gun Rights filed a lawsuit against the ATF, National Association for Gun Rights v. Garland, in federal court in the Northern District of Texas. This action was filed in the same appellate circuit that ruled earlier this year that bump stocks are not machine guns in Cargill v. Garland.
In an open letter to all federal firearms dealers in 2022, the ATF stated: “The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) recently examined devices commonly known as ‘forced reset triggers’ (FRTs) and has determined that some of them are ‘firearms’ and ‘machineguns’ as defined in the National Firearms Act (NFA), and ‘machineguns’ as defined in the Gun Control Act (GCA).”
Rare Breed Triggers began selling the Forced Reset Trigger in December of 2020, after having the design analyzed by multiple legal teams and firearms experts. By January 13th of 2021, the ATF had launched efforts to have FRTs outlawed. The ATF tried to justify this by saying that “multiple concerned citizens” reached out to them regarding Rare Breed’s FRTs, however FOIA requests proved that there was no record of a citizen ever contacting the ATF about the triggers.
“They are harassing our friends at Rare Breed Triggers for making perfectly legal forced reset triggers (FRTs). They’ve seized merchandise, raided homes, and generally rained terror down on the heads of law-abiding gun owners,” said Dudley Brown, President of the National Association for Gun Rights.

And let’s be real, the definition of a machine gun specifically states that it’s a firearm that fires more than one right with a single pull of the trigger. It says nothing about facilitating faster trigger pulls.

I mean, by that metric, Jerry Miculek should be categorized as a machine gun himself because I’m still not sure he’s entirely human.

Regardless, forced reset triggers aren’t machine guns by the NFA definition. The ATF deciding to classify them as such, then to go after Rare Breed Triggers so aggressively is beyond troubling. If taken in isolation, it would be a problem.

But we can’t look at it by itself. We have to look at it with the totality of other things the ATF has been up to, and that paints a very terrifying picture. Especially some of the recent examples.

My hope is that the courts recognize this as an unconstitutional overreach of executive authority and overturn the ATF’s bizarre fixation on forced reset triggers.