Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn argued in court this week that a device that makes it easier to fire a barrage of bullets violates a federal machine gun ban and should not be sold.
But executives of Rare Breed Triggers, a company that sells a special kind of trigger that can be inserted into a rifle to make the gun shoot a series of bullets quickly, vehemently disagreed.
“If you really thought they were machine guns, arrest me,” said Lawrence DeMonico, the company’s president, in court on Wednesday. “Let’s do it.”
The company sold more than 80,000 “forced reset triggers” — known as FRT-15s — nationwide, including to residents of New York City and Long Island, according to court documents. The dispute over whether the devices turn firearms into machine guns is similar to an ongoing debate over bump stocks, another device that makes it easier to quickly fire many rounds of ammunition. Bump stocks gained notoriety when a man used them to fire more than 1,000 rounds into a crowd at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017, killing 58 people and injuring more than 800.
The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York filed a lawsuit earlier this year to stop the company from selling the device. Prosecutors also argued in the civil suit that Rare Breed Triggers set up a “byzantine corporate structure” and used fake company names on some of their shipping labels to hide what they were doing.
Judge Nina R. Morrison imposed a temporary restraining order in February. This week’s hearing will determine whether a longer injunction could be put in place to stop sales as the case continues to wind its way through the courts. A decision is expected by early next month, though more stages of the legal dispute are likely to follow in the months ahead.
Machine guns are defined in the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968 as weapons that can shoot more than one round of ammunition “by a single function of the trigger.” Those guns are…
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