Forced-reset triggers aren’t machine guns, but they do a passable job of letting you act like they are. They still only fire one round per pull of the trigger; they just make it so you can do that a lot faster.
And, as the Supreme Court ruled on bump stocks, the ATF has no authority to redefine machine guns. They’re required to adhere to the definition laid out in the National Firearms Act, which defines a machine gun as any firearm that can fire more than one round with a single pull of that trigger.
Forced-reset triggers don’t meet it.
Yet that little technicality isn’t doing much for the feelings of the anti-gun groups.
However, the move has experts worried that an uptick in gun violence will follow, rather than this promised increase to public well-being. “The Trump administration has just effectively legalized machine guns. Lives will be lost because of his actions,” Vanessa Gonzalez, a vice president at gun-control group GIFFORDS, told the AP.
Sandy Hook Promise, a national nonprofit launched in 2013 following the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, agrees – and now, the group is fighting back. In response to the DOJ, it launched a petition urging elected officials to take actions opposing this move.
Nicole Hockley, co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise, took to Instagram to discuss the need for such action. “This [decision] is awful news for anyone interested in public safety and preventing more gun violence and more mass shootings,” she said in the video, posted this past weekend. “Many semi-automatic weapons are already too deadly, and add-ons like these forced reset triggers make them even more lethal.”
“This will put lives at risk,” she added plainly.
First, all of the fearmongering is absolute BS and we all know it.
However, even if every fear they express was the God’s honest truth, so what?
The law is the law. The definition of a machine gun under the law has nothing to do with its rate of fire. It’s how many rounds are fired when you put your booger hook on the bang switch and pull. If it’s just one, then you’re good to go. If it’s more than one, you’ve got a problem.
Forced-reset triggers don’t meet the standards for a machine gun.
And really, that’s a good thing. It’s good that the standard is upheld, because if we just used the potential rate of fire as a metric, Jerry Miculek has made a pretty good case for revolvers meeting that standard.
So while the anti-gunners are losing their minds, what they’re upset about is that the federal government isn’t ignoring the law anymore just because something feels icky.
They never should have gone after these triggers. They knew they didn’t meet the definition.
The Department of Justice made the right move because we’re a nation of laws, not a nation of feelings or hysteria.
Now, I happen to think that the NFA should be repealed entirely, but until it is, there’s a line in the sand. We, as Americans, have the right to push things as close to that line as we possibly can.
Anti-gunners should learn to suck it up.
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