On May 16, the Trump administration announced an agreement to permit the sale of forced reset triggers, a matchbook-sized device that enables semiautomatic rifles to fire faster than M16 machine guns.
The policy shift, reportedly made despite the objections of the chief counsel at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, was greeted with alarm by gun violence prevention groups, but experts are divided over how much practical impact the change will have.
“I think, honestly, the ramifications of the device itself are going to be miniscule,” said Mark Jones, a former ATF special agent who held various supervisory roles within the agency before retiring in 2011. Forced reset triggers are “a niche thing,” he added. “Most of the time, you’re not going to see them showing up in crimes.”
Forced reset triggers, or FRTs, are aftermarket devices installed in semiautomatic AR-style weapons that mechanically push the trigger forward after each shot. While the shooter still has to pull the trigger to set off the next round, the device resets the trigger so quickly that the weapon can fire at a machine gun-like rate.
The May 16 announcement was the result of a settlement between the Justice Department and Rare Breed Triggers, a North Dakota-based company that had been blocked from selling the devices after the Biden administration secured an injunction in 2023. Gun reform groups decried the settlement as dangerous and accused the Justice Department of backroom dealmaking. President Donald Trump’s White House counsel is a co-founder of the National Association for Gun Rights, which supported lifting the FRT ban.
FRTs are primarily used in AR-style rifles, and as part of the settlement, Rare Breed Triggers agreed not to make the devices for “any handgun” with an ammunition magazine that “loads into the trigger-hand grip.” But that definition still allows the company to retail the devices for AR-style pistols, in which the magazine is inserted ahead of the grip.
AR-style pistols appear nearly identical to AR-15 rifles, but the federal government classifies them as pistols because they’re made to be fired with one hand. This is achieved through a shorter barrel and the absence of a shoulder stock. However, AR-style pistols can be outfitted with a stabilizing brace that functions much like a stock. In 2023, the Biden administration ruled that pistols equipped with stabilizing braces are to be considered short-barreled rifles, and subject to much tougher regulations.
A bigger concern than forced reset triggers, experts say, are auto sears — often called Glock switches — which are installed in handguns and allow shooters to keep firing as long as the trigger is held down. Auto sears have long been considered machine guns under federal law, and they have frequently been used in crimes. “Glock switches, which are completely illegal, are way more common than forced reset triggers in the hands of the people that we mostly are concerned about, which are young men in crowded urban situations who take out their anger on each other and sometimes the general public,” Jones said.
Andrew Willinger, the executive director of Duke University’s Center for Firearms Law, has written about the legal issues surrounding FRTs. He said the devices are comparable to bump stocks, which became infamous after their use in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 60 and injured hundreds. Last year, the Supreme Court’s decision in Garland v. Cargill overturned a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, concluding that because they did not fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger,” they did not meet the definition of a machine gun.
“FRTs reset the trigger to the position that it can be pulled, but it still requires the shooter’s manual operation with each shot,” Willinger said. “And that’s really exactly the issue in Cargill. So it’s hard to see how Cargill didn’t sort of settle the question.”
But David Pucino, legal director and deputy chief counsel for the gun reform group Giffords, argues that the mechanics in bump stocks and FRTs are fundamentally different. To keep their weapon firing, shooters using bump stocks must manually apply forward pressure while the gun recoils. FRTs, on the other hand, alter the internal components of guns to allow them to keep shooting with minimal user effort.
“My concern is that you might have a deal in the future between Rare Breed and an AR manufacturer, such that you get, off the assembly line, FRT-equipped AR-15s that are then readily for sale to the public,” Pucino said.
Mark Collins, director of federal policy at Brady, another gun reform group, believes the bump stock case was wrongly decided, and that the justices might decide differently about FRTs. “The functional difference between bump stocks and FRTs is boundless,” Collins said. “They are very different devices. They achieve relatively the same thing, but the FRT is mechanical,” making it more akin to a Glock switch than a bump stock.
Rare Breed sold at least 103,000 FRTs after initially marketing the devices in 2020, according to the Justice Department. The ATF classified FRTs as illegal two years later and moved to collect the devices from owners. This month’s settlement allows the sale of FRTs to resume and establishes a process by which owners can get their confiscated or seized devices returned. FRTs retail for a few hundred dollars each.
The settlement stems from Trump’s February executive order establishing a Second Amendment Task Force to review gun-related litigation to which the Justice Department is a party. The department determined that continuing to argue the FRT case was “not in the public interest.”