“We were going to win this,” said the former senior ATF official. “These things are not like bump stocks."
Forced reset devices are actually exactly like bump stocks in that they’re legal because they force a distinct action of the trigger for every round fired. The legal definition of a machine gun is a firearm that fires more than one round per single action of the trigger. They haven’t bothered to amend or expand that definition, so these types of devices keep skirting by on a technicality.
I suppose the argument could be made that forced reset devices work in a very similar way to a machine gun’s auto sear, the difference being that they act on the trigger of the gun rather than the hammer, but it still doesn’t meet the government’s own definition of a machine gun.
Forced reset devices are actually exactly like bump stocks in that they’re legal because they force a distinct action of the trigger for every round fired. The legal definition of a machine gun is a firearm that fires more than one round per single action of the trigger. They haven’t bothered to amend or expand that definition, so these types of devices keep skirting by on a technicality.
I suppose the argument could be made that forced reset devices work in a very similar way to a machine gun’s auto sear, the difference being that they act on the trigger of the gun rather than the hammer, but it still doesn’t meet the government’s own definition of a machine gun.