top of page

Welcome to Crime and Justice News

Judge Halts Biden's Ban on Forced Reset Triggers

Crime and Justice News

A federal judge has overturned the Biden administration's prohibition on forced reset triggers, which enable semiautomatic firearms to discharge more rapidly. The judge cited the Supreme Court's recent reversal of a federal ban on bump stocks. Judge Reed O’Connor in Texas ruled in favor of guns-rights groups that sued the U.S. Justice Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2023 challenging the trigger ban. O’Connor’s ruling took the same approach that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority did in overturning the Trump administration’s ban on bump-stock devices in June by focusing on ATF’s interpretation of laws restricting the possession of machine guns, the Washington Post reports. He said that although forced reset triggers enable a user to fire weapons at a faster rate than normal triggers, they do not meet the statutory definition of a machine gun because they do not enable guns to fire multiple rounds with a “single function of the trigger.”


In 2022, AFT told firearms licensees that certain forced reset triggers, which were being marketed as replacement triggers for AR-style rifles, allowed shooters to “automatically expel more than one shot with a single, continuous pull of the trigger” and were subject to a ban. The National Association for Gun Rights and Texas Gun Rights, sued the government, arguing that the agencies had wrongly characterized forced reset triggers to ban them. ATF said that its testing found that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a forced reset trigger could fire at an average rate of 840 rounds per minute and that guns with forced reset triggers can be fired with a “single, constant pull of the trigger.” O’Connor agreed with the gun rights groups. He likened the conclusion to the Supreme Court’s decision on bump stocks that ruled against banning those devices on the argument that they did not alter the semiautomatic action of firearms despite facilitating a much faster rate of fire.

120 views

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


A daily report co-sponsored by Arizona State University, Criminal Justice Journalists, and the National Criminal Justice Association

bottom of page