The National Association for Gun Rights won a major victory in their case defending forced reset triggers (FRTs). A district court in Texas just granted a preliminary injunction against the ATF that prevents them from treating FRTs as machine guns. However, this is not the end of the forced reset trigger fight.

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Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas issued this order. The plaintiffs, the National Association for Gun Rights, Texas Gun Rights, and a few individuals, asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction against the ATF to prevent the agency from treating forced reset triggers as machine guns. A preliminary injunction comes before a final decision but prevents one party in the lawsuit from doing something while the case is still in process. It is the legal equivalent of a pause button while the case is in the courts.

Before the court could address that point it had to address some other points. First, it explains the history of this case. This part goes over the history of the NFA, how an FRT works, and how ATF has previously looked at the definition of a machine gun. Then it goes through some jurisdictional analysis and reviews the standing of the plaintiffs to make sure they are qualified to be the parties in this case.

The court then reviews the temporary restraining order (TRO) issued in April, 2023. That TRO was very limited in scope. It only protected the individuals who are the named plaintiffs from civil or criminal actions by the ATF for possessing FRTs. At the same time that the Texas lawsuit was ongoing, another lawsuit in the Eastern District of New York was not going well for forced reset triggers. In that case, the court granted a TRO that prevented Rare Breed Triggers from selling FRTs.

ATF also argued that the court could not grant this injunction because there had not been any enforcement actions under this rule. That was not a persuasive argument to the court, which used a quote from one of the Federalist Papers to observe “James Madison warned that “[t]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”” Pro tip: If you are ever litigating a case, and a judge pulls up a Federalist Papers quote to call your position tyrannical, you should probably try something different.

Cargill v. Garland

A major factor in this case is the prior 5th Circuit decision in Cargill v. Garland. That case also looked at forced reset triggers and whether or not they are machine guns. The 5th Circuit, sitting en banc (meaning it was all of the judges, not just a small panel of the judges) decided that there were two key points to define something as a machine gun: “(1) firing multiple rounds by a single function of the trigger and (2) do so automatically.” This was in the context of a bump stock.

When applied to the facts in this case it is clear that an FRT is not a machine gun. The court observed that the two points in Cargill both relate to what the trigger does, not what the trigger finger does. Critically, the definitional language “single function of the trigger” is not “single pull of the trigger.” As the court states,

By characterizing a “single function of the trigger” as a “single constant rearward pull of
the trigger,” Defendants seek to transform the required statutory focus away from the objective trigger mechanics to the subjective actions of the gun user instead.

SlideFire bump stock on an AK.

Arguments

The actual arguments brought by both sides are pretty simple. There were no real factual issues to decide. Both sides agree on how an FRT works. The difference boils down to whether a trigger that forces the shooter’s finger forward between shots is a machine gun or not. ATF’s expert witness says that it is, and NAGR’s expert witness says that it is not.

But for the court to grant a preliminary injunction, the court has to decide there is a “substantial likelihood of success on the merits.” In short, the court can only grant this relief if it seems that the party that will be protected by the injunction is probably going to win the case. That means the court has to dig into the factual arguments to see which side looks like a winner.

ATF takes a position that boils down, roughly, to “if it looks like a machine gun and sounds like a machine gun, it’s a machine gun.” They point to the fact that a forced reset trigger does not have a disconnector to interrupt the firing sequence as would be expected with a standard semi-auto trigger. ATF also makes a comparison in firing rates, which are similar between an actual machine gun and an FRT. However, the court was not impressed:

If Congress wants to amend the statutory definition in the future to define machineguns based on rate of fire or absence of a disconnector, it knows how to do so. Until such time, a comparable—and even identical—rate of fire and absence of a disconnector have no bearing on whether a firearm is a machinegun. Therefore, these comparators do not alter the Court’s determination that FRTs most likely are not machineguns.

The court then finds that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their case, and grants the preliminary injunction.

What Happens Next?

ATF can, and probably will, appeal this decision. Their odds of success are low because that appeal would be heard in the 5th Circuit. That is the same court that decided in Cargill that bump stocks are not machine guns. This case is the latest in a string of ATF defeats. Similar overreaching administrative rules about 80% receivers, bump stocks, and arm braces have also been blocked in the courts, and are generally losers when the 5th Circuit hears them.

The judge granted a preliminary injunction against the ATF which prohibits the agency from taking almost every type of enforcement against against FRTs. This is broader than a simple ban on civil or criminal cases. This order even prohibits acts like sending “notice letters” to FRT owners.

This order also applies to many more people than the initial TRO. The plaintiffs are all protected, but this injunction also protects “the downstream customers of any commercial member of an Organizational
Plaintiff” which is a much larger group than just the parties in the lawsuit. However, the decision does not apply to Rare Breed Triggers because of the injunction in the New York case. Would the ATF really try to prosecute someone with a Rare Breed Trigger when an almost identical Wide Open Trigger is protected by this injunction? Probably not, but that is not a guarantee.

The decision is 45 pages in total and is worth reading if you find this kind of thing interesting. You can read the order here.

As always with our coverage of legal issues, this is not legal advice. You should speak with a competent attorney if you think this case affects you individually.

From The National Association for Gun Rights:

Washington, D.C.- The National Association for Gun Rights scored a victory for gun rights when Judge Reed O’Connor, federal district court judge in the Northern District of Texas, granted a preliminary injunction Saturday in NAGR’s lawsuit challenging the ATF’s expansion of the statutory definition of “machinegun.”

The court’s injunction determined that “the ATF’s expanded definition of ‘machinegun’” is “likely unlawful.”

“This is our second victory in less than a week for the Second Amendment and a blow against the ATF’s unconstitutional legislating by bureaucratic rulemaking,” said Hannah Hill, Executive Director of the National Foundation for Gun Rights (legal arm of the National Association for Gun Rights.)