For those that don’t know, forced reset triggers (and the later “super safeties”) are quite essentially machine gun conversion devices in all but our narrow techno-legal definition of a machine gun. Much more straightforward to use than bump stocks or crank triggers are. Any sane government would have pulled these off the market immediately and arrested anyone who distributed them. Instead the ATF approved them for sale and then walked it back after the fact, hence this legal battle.
Militia prepper types are basically saying the use case for these is for squad-level fire support, the same way militaries use machine guns. But then they’ll gaslight you and say it isn’t a machine gun, but also all machine guns should be unregulated.
Obviously the forced-reset trigger has pretty much the same effect as a machine gun and common sense suggests that the two should have the same legal status. They don’t though because 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b) defines a machine gun as:
Any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger
and a firearm with a forced reset trigger does require a separate actuation of the trigger for each shot. It is the place of the congress, not the ATF to update the law.
This is why in the realm of drug law there is the concept of analogue illegality. As in one cant just take crack or whatever, modify it by one molecule, and then sell it legally just because it isnt crack anymore on a technical basis. Its overall similarity to crack, molecularly and in terms of functionality, makes it as illegal as crack
For those that don’t know, forced reset triggers (and the later “super safeties”) are quite essentially machine gun conversion devices in all but our narrow techno-legal definition of a machine gun. Much more straightforward to use than bump stocks or crank triggers are. Any sane government would have pulled these off the market immediately and arrested anyone who distributed them. Instead the ATF approved them for sale and then walked it back after the fact, hence this legal battle.
Militia prepper types are basically saying the use case for these is for squad-level fire support, the same way militaries use machine guns. But then they’ll gaslight you and say it isn’t a machine gun, but also all machine guns should be unregulated.
The law operates on precise definitions.
Obviously the forced-reset trigger has pretty much the same effect as a machine gun and common sense suggests that the two should have the same legal status. They don’t though because 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b) defines a machine gun as:
and a firearm with a forced reset trigger does require a separate actuation of the trigger for each shot. It is the place of the congress, not the ATF to update the law.
This is why in the realm of drug law there is the concept of analogue illegality. As in one cant just take crack or whatever, modify it by one molecule, and then sell it legally just because it isnt crack anymore on a technical basis. Its overall similarity to crack, molecularly and in terms of functionality, makes it as illegal as crack