Phil Freihofner

Exclusive: The Trump Administration has decided to permit the sale of devices that enable regular firearms to fire like machine guns, a move that one person familiar with the matter said was “by far the most dangerous thing this administration has done” on gun policy. Two people familiar with the matter told NBC News the Justice Department has signed a settlement in a lawsuit brought by the National Association for Gun Rights. The lawsuit challenged an ATF rule banning “forced reset triggers” –- devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapid burst of bullets. The settlement has not previously been reported. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. The move comes after a majority on the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals appeared to side with the gun rights group during oral arguments on the case in December, citing a Supreme Court decision last year that another rapid-fire device, called a bump stock, did not convert firearms into illegal machine guns. There have been several lawsuits over the forced reset triggers ban, and lower court judges had issued rulings that came down on both sides of the question. Assuming the Fifth Circuit ruled against the ban, the issue likely would have ended up in front of the Supreme Court. But now the Trump administration is abandoning the effort to restrict the devices. “We were going to win this,” said a former senior ATF official. “These things are not like bump stocks.” The Justice Department declined to comment. President Trump’s White House counsel. David Warrington, is a co-founder of the National Association for Gun Rights and was counsel of record the lawsuit until he left to join the Trump Administration. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his role, if any, in the settlement discussions. The Trump Administration has celebrated its protection of gun rights. Under the settlement, the Justice Department “will bind itself, in perpetuity, not to enforce the machinegun ban against any device that functions like forced reset triggers,” one person familiar with the settlement told NBC News. “ATF must also return thousands of seized forced reset triggers to their previous owners. In other words, machine guns will soon become legal to possess and purchase, and the federal government will flood the market with these devices.” Some of the most popular versions of these devices are made by a company called Rare Breed Triggers, which was sued by the ATF in a separate case. That case will have to be dropped as part of the settlement, one of the people familiar with it said. Proponents of the devices dispute that they turn regular guns into machine guns. But the ATF determined that the devices allow a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle to fire as fast as a military M-16 in automatic mode, according to court records. Since the forced reset trigger devices will not be considered firearms, they can be purchased anonymously, without a background or age check. Machine guns have been mostly illegal in the United States since 1934, a notion that even gun rights groups have come to accept. The effort to ban forced reset triggers originated in the first Trump Administration, at the same time the ATF also banned bump stocks, another device that enabled rapid trigger pulls that mimic the firing rate of a machine gun. The gunman in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting killed 58 people while firing from his hotel room window using bump stocks. The Supreme Court ruled by a 6-3 margin last year that the bump stock ban was unlawful after the majority concluded the devices did not meet the definition of a machine gun because they didn’t allow for automatic fire with the single pull of a trigger.

Watters: Do you believe Comey should be in jail? Gabbard: I do… Comey, in my view, should be held accountable and put behind bars for this