Trump admin permits sale of device that allows standard firearms to fire like machine guns

The Trump administration has decided to permit the sale of devices that enable standard firearms to fire like machine guns, a move that one person familiar with the matter said was “by far the most dangerous thing this administration has done” on gun policy.

The Justice Department on Friday announced a settlement in a lawsuit brought by the National Association for Gun Rights. The lawsuit challenged an ATF rule banning “forced reset triggers” — devices that allow semiautomatic weapons to fire rapid bursts of bullets.

“This Department of Justice believes that the 2nd Amendment is not a second-class right,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement. “And we are glad to end a needless cycle of litigation with a settlement that will enhance public safety.”

Vanessa Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Giffords, the national gun violence prevention group led by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, condemned the move.

“The Trump administration has just effectively legalized machine guns. Lives will be lost because of his actions,” said Gonzalez. “This is an incredibly dangerous move that will enable shooters to inflict horrific damage. The only people who benefit from these being on the market are the people who will make money from selling them, everyone else will suffer the consequences.”

Ongoing court battles

The move comes after a majority of judges on the conservative 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals appeared to side with the gun rights group during oral arguments in the case in December. The judges cited a Supreme Court decision last year finding that another rapid-fire device, called a bump stock, did not convert firearms into illegal machine guns.

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 illegal in the United States since 1986, a notion that even gun rights groups have come to accept.

There have been several lawsuits over the forced reset trigger ban, and lower court judges had issued rulings that came down on both sides of the question. Assuming the 5th Circuit ruled against the ban, the issue likely would have ended up in front of the Supreme Court.

But now the Trump administration is abandoning the effort to restrict the devices. A former senior ATF official criticized the move and predicted that the courts would have upheld a ban on reset trigger devices.

“We were going to win this,” said the former senior ATF official. “These things are not like bump stocks.”

Trump’s White House counsel, David Warrington, is a co-founder of the National Association for Gun Rights and was counsel of record in the lawsuit until he left to join the Trump administration. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his role, if any, in the settlement discussions.

Brady United, the country’s oldest gun violence prevention group, condemned Warrington’s role.

“This dangerous backroom deal spearheaded by Trump’s general counsel — the co-founder of one of the biggest gun rights groups in the country — is not only an incredible abuse of power, but undermines decades of sensible gun safety policy and puts communities at immediate risk,” Kris Brown, the group’s president, said in a statement to NBC News.

A DOJ official said Warrington was not involved in the settlement negotiations.

A settlement ‘in perpetuity’

Under the settlement, the Justice Department “will bind itself, in perpetuity, not to enforce the machine gun 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 forced reset triggers 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.

The Justice Department news release said the settlement “includes agreed-upon conditions that significantly advance public safety with respect to FRTs, including that Rare Breed will not develop or design FRTs for use in any pistol and will enforce its patents to prevent infringement that could threaten public safety. Rare Breed also agrees to promote the safe and responsible use of its products.”

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

The effort to ban forced reset triggers originated in the first Trump administration, at the same time that the ATF also banned bump stocks, another device that enables 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. 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.