National Association for Gun Rights Takes Legal Action to End ATF’s Unconstitutional Trigger Prohibition
Jose Nino
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On August 10, 2023, the National Association for Gun Rights published a press release announcing its decision to file a lawsuit against the ATF, National Association for Gun Rights v. Garland. The lawsuit was filed on August 9 in federal court in the Northern District of Texas.
The lawsuit is “seeking declaratory and injunctive relief to end Defendants’ arbitrary, capricious, and otherwise unlawful efforts to misclassify Forced Reset Triggers as ‘machineguns’ under the National Firearms Act of 1934.” This lawsuit was filed in the same appellate circuit that ruled earlier in 2023 that bump stocks are not machine guns. The case in this instance was Cargill v. Garland.
According to federal law, a machine gun is classified as “a 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.” This definition has not been changed in the law for nearly nine decades. However, the ATF is currently ignoring and attempting to rewrite this definition through civil charges against Rare Breed Triggers. Rare Breed Triggers’ FRT only lets one round be fired off for each function of the trigger.
“They are harassing our friends at Rare Breed Triggers for making perfectly legal forced reset triggers (FRTs). They’ve seized merchandise, raided homes, and generally rained terror down on the heads of law-abiding gun owners,” declared Dudley Brown, President of the National Association for Gun Rights. “They’re even bringing up Rare Breed Triggers on civil charges in an attempt to run them out of business.”
The lawsuit’s goal is to do away with the ATF’s FRT trigger prohibition and to shield NAGR’s members and supporters who possess FRTs from the ATF’s capricious regulatory behavior.
“If we allow the ATF to continue to whittle away our rights by constant re-defining of what is, and what isn’t legal, we’ll soon be left with no rights at all. There should be no authority for a government agency to make rule of law unilaterally by themselves, and the courts need to recognize that,” declared Hannah Hill, Executive Director of the National Foundation for Gun Rights, legal arm of the National Association for Gun Rights.
NAGR is one of the few organizations who will consistently fight the ATF. The ATF is one of the worst government agencies present in the DC Swamp. Its extra-legislative behavior would make the Founding Fathers roll over in their graves.
For that reason, it should be undermined as much as possible through legal action, defunding, and eventual abolition. The ATF can not be allowed to function freely if we want to live in a genuinely free society.
NAGR’s lawsuit can be found here.
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