Northern District of Texas Judge Reed O'Connor ruled in favor of gun owners' rights groups that had sued the Department of Justice, United States Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in 2023 challenging the ban. The said suit centered on the ATF's broadening of the term "machine gun" to include FRTs.
According to the ruling, although FRTs enable a user to fire weapons at a faster rate than normal triggers, they do not meet the statutory definition of a machine gun because they do not enable guns to fire multiple rounds with a "single function of the trigger."
O'Connor's decision also cited the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that spurred the polarizing debate on the legality of devices that increase the rate of fire of semiautomatic weapons. The judge acknowledged the "tragic nature" of the shooting but said that "no matter how terrible the circumstances, there is never a situation that justifies a court altering statutory text that was democratically enacted by those who are politically accountable."
Two of the plaintiffs in the case were Texas Gun Rights, Inc., and the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR). There were individual plaintiffs, as well. NAGR President Dudley Brown wrote in a statement that the decision, along with the Supreme Court's ruling on bump stocks, forces ATF "to return to their Constitutional boundaries."
An FRT is a device that resets a semiautomatic firearm's trigger mechanically, thus allowing the gun to be fired faster. However, the gun still fires only one round per trigger pull.
The ATF said in a 2022 letter to federal firearms licensees, that certain forced reset triggers, which were being marketed as replacement triggers for AR-style rifles, allow shooters to "automatically expel more than one shot with a single, continuous pull of the trigger" and were subject to a ban.
The FRT rule is the second ATF rule O’Connor has vacated in 2024. On June 13, 2024, Breitbart News reported that O'Connor vacated the ATF's AR pistol brace rule, noting that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act.
The ATF pistol brace rule targets stabilizer braces attached to AR pistols, claiming the braces turn AR pistols into short barrel rifles (SBRs). And since SBRs are regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934, the ATF issued its rule on AR-pistol braces to stop what it saw as a way around SBR regulations. (Related: 2nd Amendment 'does not exist' in some NY courtrooms according to one judge presiding over the trial of a gunsmith.)
Judge rules that New Jersey's ban on the AR-15 is unconstitutional
Another judge who fights unconstitutional gun bans is District Judge Peter Sheridan, who recently ruled that New Jersey's ban on the AR-15 violates the Second Amendment.
Sheridan cited recent Supreme Court rulings when shooting down New Jersey's ban on the rifle. This includes New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which forces judges to view Second Amendment law in light of the "historical tradition of firearm regulation."
"The AR-15 provision of the Assault Firearms Law is unconstitutional under Bruen and Heller as to the Colt AR-15 for use of self-defense within the home," Sheridan wrote in his 69-page ruling.
The Second Amendment advocacy group Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs and two Garden State gun owners claimed that the state's assault weapons ban limited their constitutional options for home defense. They appeared to take issue with the entirety of the state ban on assault weapons. However, Sheridan ruled that since a majority of their arguments focused solely on the AR-15, then that was the only weapon he could definitively rule on.
In his order, the judge begrudged the Supreme Court's new standards on Second Amendment issues but acknowledged that he must nonetheless follow the high court's precedents.
"It is hard to accept the Supreme Court's pronouncements that certain firearms policy choices are 'off the table' when frequently, radical individuals possess and use these same firearms for evil purposes," Sheridan wrote. "Even so… where the Supreme Court has set forth the law of our nation, as a lower court, I am bound to follow it."
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