Bondi’s DOJ Forces a Reset
17th May 2025
One benefit, if you can call it that, of the apocalypse is that the news is very interesting these days. Today, I read that certain types of machine guns are now legal throughout the US under federal, but not necessarily state, law. No approval process or federal tax stamp required. There’s an entertaining morning read.
The general rule is that the feds will not let you have a gun that left the factory capable of shooting full auto unless you pay for an enhanced background check, hand over $200 as an infringing discouragement tax, and agree to have your name on a federal list forever. This also applies to certain gun parts. In addition, your gun or part has to have been made before a certain date in 1986. This is more or less how it works, but it’s not a rigorous explanation.
There has been a lot of squabbling over certain gun parts made after the 1986 cutoff. One example is the bump stock. Another is the lightning link, which is a little piece of steel you put in an AR-platform gun to turn it into a machine gun. A guy is currently rotting in prison for selling a steel card featuring a picture of a lightning link that requires the user to cut it out and install it.
Another example: the forced-reset trigger or “FRT.” I don’t know exactly how these work because I DO NOT HAVE ONE, MR. ATF BLOG READER. I have seen people shooting them on Youtube, however, and it seems fair to me to say they turn AR’s into machine guns. They work very well, unlike bump stocks, which wobble around.
While they turn guns into machine guns for practical purposes, guns with FRT’s aren’t “machine guns” according to federal law’s definition. That’s what Pam Bondi now says, according to a federal lawsuit that was resolved yesterday.