The Trump administration has decided to allow the sale of equipment so that standard guns can fire like machine guns, a move familiarizing itself with the matter is “the most dangerous thing the administration has done to gun policy so far.”
The Justice Department announced Friday the settlement of a lawsuit filed by the National Association for Gun Rights. The lawsuit challenges the ATF rule that prohibits “forced reset triggers” – devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly-exploding bullets.
"The Justice Department believes that the Second Amendment is not a second-class right," Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement. "And we are pleased to end the unnecessary cycle of litigation and to improve public safety through solutions."
Vanessa Gonzalez, a spokesman for Giffords, is a condemnation of the national gun violence group led by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
"The Trump administration has just effectively legalized machine guns. Life will be lost due to his actions," Gonzalez said. "This is an extremely dangerous move that will cause terrible harm to the shooter. The only people who benefit from the market are those who will make money from selling them, and everyone else will suffer the consequences."
The move was linked to the gun rights group during the December verbal debate by most judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The judge cited last year's Supreme Court ruling that another fast-firing device called Bump stock did not convert a gun into an illegal machine gun.
Since a forced reset trigger device will not be considered a gun, it can be purchased anonymously without background or age checks. Machine guns have been illegal in the United States since 1986, i.e., the notion that even gun rights groups have accepted.
There have been several lawsuits regarding the forced reset triggering of the injunction, with the lower judges rulings from both parties. Assuming the Fifth Circuit ruled to prohibit the injunction, the issue could end up ahead of the Supreme Court.
But now, the Trump administration has abandoned efforts to limit equipment. A former ATF official criticized the move and predicted that the court would uphold an ban on resetting the trigger device.
"We're going to win," the former ATF official said. "These things don't look like dents."
Trump's White House attorney David Warrington was co-founder of the National Association for Gun Rights and was a record lawyer in the lawsuit until he left the Trump administration. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its role, if any, during the settlement discussion.
Brady United, the country's oldest gun violence prevention group, has condemned Warrington's role.
"This dangerous fall deal led by Trump's general counsel, co-founder of one of the country's largest gun rights groups, is not only an incredible abuse of power, but also undermines decades of wise gun safety policies and gives communities immediate risk," Kris Brown, the group's president, said in a statement to NBC News.
Under the solution, the Justice Department “will permanently restrain itself rather than tying the machine gun ban on any device that features such as forced reset triggers,” a person familiar with the settlement told NBC News. “The ATF also has to return thousands of seized forced reset triggers to their former owners. In other words, machine guns will soon become legal ownership and purchases, and the federal government will flood the market with these devices.”
Some of the most popular forced reset triggers are made by a company called Rare Breed Triggers, which in another case was sued by the ATF. One person familiar with the case said the case must be part of the solution.
The Justice Department press release said the settlement “includes agreed terms that would greatly improve public safety, including that rare species will not develop or design FRT for any pistol and will enforce its patents to prevent infringement that could threaten public safety.
Supporters of these devices controversially force reset triggers to turn the standard gun into a machine gun. However, the ATF determined that these devices allow semi-automatic AR-15 rifles to fire at the speed of the military M-16 in automatic mode.
The effort to ban forced resets of triggers originated from the first Trump administration, while the ATF also banned the bump stock, another device that allows fast-triggering to mimic the firing rate of a machine gun. The gunman in the 2017 Las Vegas Volkswagen shooting killed 58 people while shooting in a window in his hotel room.
The Supreme Court ruled last year with a 6-3 profit ruling that the stock crash ban was illegal. Most people concluded that these devices do not meet the definition of machine guns, because they do not allow automatic firing using a single pull force of the trigger.