Justice Department Settles Lawsuits, Allowing Sales of Rapid-Fire Trigger Devices

The Department of Justice has agreed to settle a lawsuit challenging its classification of some rapid-fire trigger devices, known as forced-reset triggers, as machine gun parts.

On May 16, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the department had agreed to discontinue its legal battles with Rare Breed Triggers, a company producing some of these forced-reset trigger products.

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

Existing federal law defines a machine gun as “any weapon that shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” Machine guns are strictly regulated, and those convicted of possessing unregistered machine guns may face sentences of up to 10 years in prison.

The forced-reset trigger is one of several firearm products that have emerged in recent years, which were designed to allow a user to produce a rapid-fire effect without satisfying the legal definition of a machine gun.

A common, civilian-legal semi-automatic trigger will allow a user to depress the trigger to fire a single shot, after which the user has to release the trigger to allow it to mechanically reset to the unfired position, after which the user may depress the trigger again for a subsequent shot. A forced-reset trigger is designed such that, upon being depressed, it will spring back to the unfired position without being released by the user, allowing a user to more rapidly depress it again for subsequent shots.

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In turn, Rare Breed Triggers and various supporting gun rights advocates challenged the classification, arguing that the bureau’s classification decision was flawed. These challenges have progressed through multiple separate federal courts.

The Department of Justice said this settlement decision will resolve cases before the 2nd and 5th Circuit Courts, and before the U.S. District Court for Utah.

Announcing the settlement decision, the Department of Justice noted the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Cargill v. Garland. The case concerned other rapid-fire firearm devices, known as bump stocks, which assist a users in a technique known as bump-firing, whereby they can harness the recoil of their firearms to fire more rapidly.

The Supreme Court’s majority ruled in favor of plaintiffs challenging an ATF rule treating bump stocks as machine guns. Writing the majority opinion in the bump stock case, Justice Clarence Thomas concluded, “A bump stock merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate ‘functions’ of the trigger.”

Gun rights advocates have cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Cargill v. Garland to seek a similar ruling protecting forced-reset triggers.

With the settlement, the Department of Justice has agreed to return any forced-reset trigger products it has seized. In turn, the Department of Justice has said Rare Breed Triggers has agreed not to develop a forced-reset trigger product for any pistol, and to “enforce its patents to prevent infringement that could threaten public safety.”

Lawrence DeMonico, president of Rare Breed Triggers, celebrated the settlement decision in a Friday video statement. DeMonico also pledged to resume production of forced-reset trigger products, which his company had paused during the legal battle.

DeMonico credited the Department of Justice’s settlement decision to the change in administrations from Biden to Trump.

“With the Trump administration’s renewed focus on justice and their commitment to correcting the weaponization of the DOJ under the Biden administration, we were finally able to secure a deal that brought this fight to a close,” he said.

“The Trump administration has just effectively legalized machine guns. Lives will be lost because of his actions,” said Vanessa Gonzalez, Giffords’ vice president of government and political affairs. “This is an incredibly dangerous move that will enable shooters to inflict horrific damage.”