A federal district judge in Fort Worth has blocked President Joe Biden’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives prohibition on forced reset triggers.
Judge Reed O’Connor of the federal District Court in Northern Texas ruled Tuesday that the ATF unconstitutionally chipped away at FRTs by reclassifying guns with the accessory as machineguns from 2021 until 2022.
An FRT allows semiautomatic weapons to fire more rapidly by quickly returning the trigger to its starting position after it is pulled. Long a legal device, the ATF began issuing reports defining certain FRTs as machine guns.
From 2018 until just this year, machine guns were a fairly broad category that encompassed more than just automatic weapons or semiautomatic weapons with heavy modifications. The ATF also used this to designate semiautomatic guns with certain common accessories the agency claimed turned them into automatic ones, including FRTs.
The FRT reports, starting in 2021, culminated in a March 2022 “Open Letter to All Federal Firearm Licensees,” which severely limited the scope of most FRTs on the market.
“The DOJ has also initiated civil proceedings against at least one company and two individuals for manufacturing and selling FRTs,” explained O’Connor in his 64-page decision.
“More proceedings seem inevitable given that the ATF sent cease-and-desist letters regarding possession of FRTs as recently as October 2023 and even seized FRTs as recently as September 2023,” he added.
O’Connor sided with the plaintiffs, led by the National Association for Gun Rights, granting them a judgment without trial. He specifically cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2024 Garland v. Cargill decision as the reason for his immediate ruling.
In Garland v. Cargill, the high court found that a ban on bump stock devices dating back to the Trump administration was unconstitutional because the agency’s definition of “machinegun” was too broad.
The Supreme Court instead defined “machinegun” as requiring the gun to fire continuously while the trigger is held. O’Connor believes FRTs, like bump stocks, do not qualify for the clarified definition.
In the FRT case’s conclusions, O’Connor wrote that the court vacates, declares as unlawful, and enjoins the rule from being enforced.
The court also orders defendants to return all affected parties their FRTs within 30 days, and mail notices to those they warned about their FRTs that their prior notices were illegal.
“This win serves as a reminder to the power-hungry three-letter agencies that they do not hold unchecked authority over the Second Amendment,” stated a Texas Gun Rights spokesperson, a plaintiff in the lawsuit alongside NAGR. “It is a victory for every gun owner in America.”
National Foundation for Gun Rights Executive Director Hannah Hill also told Reuters this week that her group was “absolutely thrilled that the court has dealt such a decisive blow to the ATF’s unconstitutional agency overreach.”
O’Connor previously issued a temporary injunction on the FRT ban, preventing its enforcement on members of the National Association for Gun Rights and any “downstream customers” of the group and Texas Gun Rights.
Before that, O’Connor issued an even narrower temporary restraining order blocking the ban’s enforcement only against the individual plaintiffs.
