The ATF: The Federal agency that legal gun owners love to hate.
And with good reason. After all, any restrictions of our Second Amendment rights is a violation of that Second Amendment, and has the ATF ever been used, in relation to firearms, in a way that hasn’t, effectively, restricted the rights of legal, law-abiding American citizens?
So, for that reason, I’m an advocate for abolishing the ATF. Until enough politicians get their heads out of their collective backsides on this issue, though, I’ll have to bide my time and enjoy seeing them take losses in court.
And, if I’m being honest, this win can probably be chalked up to the way that Donald Trump is running things now that he’s back in the White House, so, thank you for this one, President Trump. Ryan Morgan gives us the details:
In March 2022, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), under the Biden administration, issued a letter declaring that some forced-reset triggers meet the legal definition of a machine gun part.
In turn, Rare Breed Triggers and various gun rights advocates challenged the classification, arguing that the bureau’s classification decision was flawed. These challenges have progressed through multiple federal courts.
The Department of Justice said that [the decision to settle a lawsuit challenging its classification of some rapid-fire trigger devices, known as forced-reset triggers, as machine gun parts] will resolve cases before the Second and Fifth Circuit Courts, and before the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah.
Settling this case was absolutely the right decision.
Whether you want to use forced reset triggers or not, it’s not the government’s business to monitor or pay attention to that.
Even if they were able to stay on top of these kinds of modifications, they can’t keep criminals from modifying illegally owned firearms to fully automatic weapons (see here if you don’t remember this story). So why are they wasting time trying to keep the people who aren’t committing crimes from getting and using these triggers for legal and lawful uses instead of trying to keep criminals from getting and using them (even if they actually could prevent criminals from getting and using them)?
All in all, I’m glad that the administration decided to settle this case instead of continuing the Biden-era push to rob us of our rights. Siding with the Constitution and the American people was the right thing to do.