Texas judge strikes down Biden restriction on modified semiautomatic guns

A federal judge recently struck down a Biden administration ban on forced reset triggers, devices that allow semiautomatic guns to fire at faster rates, citing the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a ban on bump stocks last month, reported the Washington Post.

Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas ruled in favor of guns-rights groups that had sued the U.S. Justice Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2023 challenging the 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. It stated 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.”

Dudley Brown, president of the National Association for Gun Rights, one of the groups that challenged the ban, wrote in a statement that Tuesday’s decision — along with the Supreme Court’s ruling on bump stocks — forces ATF “to return to their Constitutional boundaries.”

Attorneys for the Justice Department and ATF did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening.

Forced reset triggers are devices that forcibly return the trigger of a firearm to its reset or ready-to-fire position after a bullet is fired, which allows a user to more quickly fire successive shots.

In a 2022 letter to federal firearms licensees, ATF said 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, another advocacy group, sued the Justice Department and ATF in August 2023, arguing that the agencies had wrongly characterized forced reset triggers to ban them.

In court filings, 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.”

In his ruling, O’Connor sided with the National Association for Gun Rights and Texas Gun Rights in arguing that forced reset triggers still only fire a single round with “a single function of the trigger.” He likened the characterization to the Supreme Court’s decision on bump stocks. The Supreme Court in June similarly 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.

O’Connor’s ruling referenced the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that spurred the Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks and a polarizing debate on the legality of devices that increase the rate of fire of semiautomatic weapons.

O’Connor acknowledged the “tragic nature” of the shooting but said that “no matter how terrible the circumstances, there is never a situation that justifies a court altering statutory text that was democratically enacted by those who are politically accountable.”

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