When the ATF decided to reclassify bump stocks as machine guns, it may have been directed by President Donald Trump as a way to head off a legislative action that would have gone well beyond bump stocks. The problem was that it opened the door for the ATF to start deciding to reclassify all kinds of things that were previously allowed.
One of those was forced reset triggers. These things simply force the trigger to reset, which in turn helps speed up firing. They’re not machine guns because you still have to pull the trigger for each round to fire.
That didn’t matter to the ATF. They banned them anyway.
Which, obviously, prompted a challenge to their decision. Now, that challenge was presented to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and while a decision hasn’t been reached yet, it doesn’t look like the ATF is going to like what will happen.
A panel of Fifth Circuit judges seemed on Monday to side with gun rights groups in their lawsuit challenging the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ classification of forced reset triggers as illegal machine guns.
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Justice Department attorney Brad Hinshelwood argued before a three-judge panel Monday a Texas federal court incorrectly ruled in July that the ATF exceeded its authority and misapplied the U.S. Supreme Court’s Garland v. Cargill ruling in this case.
The Supreme Court ruled in Cargill that bump stocks — which use the firearm’s recoil to slide the weapon back and forth within the stock, causing the trigger to “bump” against the shooter’s stationary finger and thereby allowing for a rapid rate of fire without the shooter having to move their finger for each shot — do not meet the statutory definition of machine guns.
Hinshelwood argued that the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Cargill was specific to bump stocks, while forced reset triggers operate in a different manner that makes them legally machine guns.
The National Firearms Act defines machine guns as as firearms that fire “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger,” as well as parts designed to convert a weapon into a machine gun.
“The crucial distinction for these purposes between a non-mechanical bump stock, the devices the court actually opined on, and the specific devices at issue here … is that these devices don’t have a disconnector, they don’t have that component that forces, physically, a need to release and then re-engage the trigger for every shot,” Hinshelwood said.
However, U.S. Circuit Judge Leslie Southwick seemed skeptical of this argument.
“It seems to me … you’re trying to get us not to focus on the trigger,” Southwick, a George W. Bush appointee, said. “Obviously, that’s part of the statute, ‘single function of the trigger.'”
Southwick nailed it.
Forced reset triggers allow one to fire a semi-auto really quickly, but you still have to pull the trigger each time the gun is fired. Each round is fired with a single function of the trigger, which is how the law passed by Congress defines what is a machine gun and what isn’t.
Cargill matters here because the Court argued in that case that the statute as written supersedes the ATF’s desire to regulate how quickly something can fire. Bump stocks let people shoot as fast as a machine gun, but the rate of fire isn’t what Congress used to define a machine gun. This applies in the case of forced reset triggers.
The ATF doesn’t have to like it, but they will have to learn to deal with their disappointment.
The truth of the matter is that while I’d rather they get out of the regulating business in the first place, the lines have already been drawn on these things. That line is that they are limited by how things are defined in legislation, not how they wish they were defined.
We’ll see how things go from here, but it’s not looking good for the ATF going forward.
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