A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Biden administration “exceeded its statutory authority” when it reclassified certain types of rapid-fire triggers as machine guns, making them illegal.
U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor for the Northern District of Texas has voided the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives' (ATF) classification of forced reset triggers (FRTs) as machine guns “illegal” and ordered the agency to return all seized FRTs to their rightful owners.
According to the Daily Caller, an FRT is “a firearm part that allows the trigger to reset more quickly than a normal trigger by forcing it back to the starting position after a shot is fired. This mechanism allows a shooter to fire multiple rounds at a faster rate without converting the firearm into a fully automatic firearm.”
The statutory definition of a “machine gun” (a one-word term in O'Connor) is a weapon that “automatically fires multiple rounds upon a single pull of the trigger.” Making, selling, or possessing a machine gun is almost always a violation of federal law.
In 2018, after the Las Vegas massacre, the ATF, at the direction of then-President Donald Trump, reinterpreted “single trigger function” as “an action similar to pulling a single trigger” and subsequently began classifying certain types of firearms as machine guns based on that definition. Three years later, the Biden administration determined that FRTs also qualify as machine guns and began taking action against manufacturers, sellers, and owners of FRTs. Some of those targeted by the administration filed lawsuits led by the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR).
Plaintiff's arguments
The plaintiffs' argument was simple: the law states that to be considered a machine gun, a gun must “automatically” fire multiple shots with a “single” pull of the trigger. FRTs simply allow a shooter to fire faster than normal, and they still have to pull the trigger for each shot they want to fire. Thus, FRTs do not qualify as machine guns under the relevant law.
Judge O'Connor declared that “plaintiffs have merit,” citing primarily the Supreme Court's recent Garland v. Cargill decision, which held that the ATF's broad definition of “machine gun” was invalid, at least with respect to bump stocks.
“Cargill categorically rejected the ATF's interpretation of the machine gun,” he wrote.
“The FRT cannot be called a machine gun because it does not fire multiple bullets with a single pull of the trigger,” he asserted.
Moreover, he determined that the ATF's reinterpretation of the law was inconsistent with the statute's letter: “Because of this inconsistency, the ATF's expansion of the definition of machine gun, and subsequent classification of FRTs, is unlawful.”
The administration argued that the FRT qualifies as a machine gun because it has a similar rate of fire and lacks a disconnector. “But these arguments are foreclosed by the statutory definition and by Cargill,” O'Connor wrote. “If Congress in the future wishes to amend the statutory definition to define a machine gun based on rate of fire or the presence or absence of a disconnector, we know how to do that.”
He further stated:
The tragic nature of the Las Vegas shooting that prompted the final rule is undeniable. But no situation, no matter how dire, ever justifies a court changing the text of a statute that was democratically enacted by politically accountable people. That responsibility belongs solely to Congress. The Constitution assigns such legislative choice to appropriate elected officials, not to life-tenured judges or unelected bureaucrats. Defendants, instead of respecting this deliberate feature of our democratic system, have chosen to advance a policy agenda that is entirely foreign to the text of the statute. Thus, condoning Defendants' unlawful conduct is, in effect, rewriting (the law). That is not how a democratic system functions. (Emphasis in original.)
O'Connor's resentment towards the administration is clear throughout his opinion, and he spends a considerable amount of ink refuting its plausible arguments.
Government response
As always, the government argued that its adversaries lacked standing to sue. The administration maintained that it had no immediate plans to prosecute anyone solely for possessing FRT, but it had sent threatening letters to FRT owners and sent agents to get them to “voluntarily” turn over their FRT. Instead, the government said it would only go after “large-scale manufacturers and distributors of FRT,” while simultaneously claiming that they had no stake in the case. The administration further argued that courts lack the authority to review agency actions prior to enforcement, a claim that O'Connor readily denied.
The government also tried to exclude evidence outside the ATF's own deliberative process, such as expert testimony on the FRT, even though it made its decision without any public input — a practice the judge called “nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to inject Chevron-style deference into this case,” a practice recently struck down by the Supreme Court.
Hannah Hill, executive director of the National Foundation for Gun Rights, the legal arm of NAGR, praised O'Connor's decision.
“We are thrilled that the Court has dealt a decisive blow to the ATF's unconstitutional abuse of its powers. The ATF under the Biden/Harris Administration has moved zealously to destroy the Second Amendment, completely trampling on the Constitution and the rule of law,” she said in a statement. “While the ATF may appeal this decision, we are confident that both precedent and momentum are on our side and that the ATF's illegal and unconstitutional mandatory reset trigger ban will be ended once and for all.”
