By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump‘s administration agreed on Friday to permit the sale and possession of devices that let gun enthusiasts convert semiautomatic rifles into weapons that can shoot as fast as machine guns.
The agreement came in a settlement announced by the Department of Justice resolving lawsuits brought under Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, after his administration banned certain “forced-reset triggers.”
“This Department of Justice believes that the 2nd Amendment is not a second-class right,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement, referring to the constitutional right to bear arms. “And we are glad to end a needless cycle of litigation with a settlement that will enhance public safety.”
The deal was condemned by Vanessa Gonzalez, vice president of government and political affairs at the gun control group Giffords, who said “the Trump administration has just effectively legalized machine guns.”
“Lives will be lost because of his actions,” she said.
In 2022, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives notified firearms licensees that it had determined some such devices constituted illegal machine guns under the National Firearms Act.
The DOJ a year later filed a lawsuit in New York against a company that made and distributed such devices nationwide, Rare Breed Triggers, leading to a court ruling blocking it from continuing to sell them.
In moving to prevent the sale of such devices, the Biden administration cited the frequency at which AR-15-style semiautomatic firearms have been used in mass shootings nationwide.
While the New York case was pending, the National Association for Gun Rights filed a lawsuit in Texas challenging the Biden-era ban, leading to a judge concluding the ban was unlawful as he barred its enforcement.
Friday’s settlement resolved those lawsuits, which were on appeal, with an agreement to return all forced-reset triggers seized or surrendered to the government to their owners.
The Trump administration agreed to not apply the machine gun ban to such devices so long as they are not designed for use with handguns.
“This decision marks a new era of holding the DOJ and ATF accountable when they trample the rights of law-abiding gun owners,” Dudley Brown, the National Association for Gun Rights’ president, said in a statement.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Leigh Jones and William Mallard)