\n
![](\"https:\/\/progressive.org\/downloads\/21817\/download\/MachineGuns.jpg?cb=fadfb44acd46f40d9e622a2a6ae63c0a\")
<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
The United States has long suffered the highest incidence<\/a> of gun violence in the developed world. But the conditions surrounding gun ownership in the United States may soon get even worse, owing to recent actions by the Trump Administration that will make already powerful weapons like AR-15 rifles even more lethal. And all this is happening during an ongoing cultural shift that sees threats and intimidation as legitimate forms of political expression.<\/p>\n On May 16, the Trump Administration abandoned efforts<\/a> to restrict sales of a device known as a \u201cforced trigger reset.\u201d The device converts semi-automatic weapons, which fire one shot with each pull of the trigger, into weapons that can be fired continuously by holding down the trigger, like a machine gun. The forced trigger reset device was developed as an improvement on an older, cruder mechanical innovation called a bump stock<\/a>, which is slower and less accurate<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Both conversion devices are currently legal nationwide. But the new device, the forced trigger reset, is a game changer in both reliability and firepower.<\/p>\n Bump stocks became a topic of national focus in 2017, when a mass shooter in Las Vegas used an arsenal of bump stock-converted<\/a> AR-15 rifles to open fire on the crowd at a country music festival, killing fifty-eight people and injuring more than 800. After the shooting\u2014the worst<\/a> in modern history\u2014both the Trump Administration and the National Rifle Association (NRA) conceded to public pressure to back<\/a> a ban on bump stocks.\u00a0<\/p>\n Last year, however, the Supreme Court ruled<\/a> the bump stock ban unconstitutional. The majority, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, had by then expanded the theory of originalism championed<\/a> by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, which holds that the interpretations of the U.S. Constitution should be based mostly on the original meanings at the time of its ratification or before. The Roberts court applied originalist logic to a gun case for the first time in 2022, when it overturned<\/a> a century-old ban on carrying handguns in New York State without a permit.<\/p>\n Since then, the Court\u2019s test for determining the constitutionality of any modern gun law is whether the law is analogous<\/a> to laws that were in effect no later than 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment on birthright citizenship was ratified, according to Justice Thomas in his majority opinion<\/a>. Modern considerations\u2014such as the fact that gun violence has surpassed<\/a> both vehicular accidents and diseases like cancer as the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers, especially Black youth\u2014now play little or no role<\/a> in gun cases.<\/p>\n The legality of forced trigger resets came to the fore as the result of a lawsuit filed during the Biden Administration by the National Association of Gun Rights<\/a>, a twenty-first century, more radical rival to the more-than-150-year-old NRA, argued in its suit<\/a> that these devices should be as accessible as bump stocks. The case ended up in the conservative-leaning Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, where its judges seemed inclined<\/a> to agree. The Trump Administration agreed to settle<\/a> the matter by legalizing<\/a> forced trigger resets. The agreement<\/a> also requires the government to return previously seized devices.<\/p>\n The Justice Department is not classifying forced trigger resets as firearms, meaning they can be sold anonymously and without a background check, in person or online<\/a>, to anyone\u2014including minors. The only restriction is that they must be designed for rifles and not handguns, although users could easily modify them to work on handguns<\/a> as well.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The legalization of both these devices is contingent on the definition<\/a> of a machine gun as laid out in the National Firearms Act<\/a>, a 1934 law passed in the aftermath of Prohibition and the Tommy Gun days of Al Capone. The act defines a machine gun as one that is able to reload and keep firing from \u201ca single function of the trigger.\u201d But bump stocks and forced trigger resets instead harness<\/a> the weapon\u2019s recoil<\/a> combined with steady pressure from the index finger on the trigger to repeatedly engage it beyond a single \u201cfunction,\u201d or pull, to keep the weapon reloading and firing.<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible the Supreme Court could yet rule forced trigger resets as being in violation of the 1934 law, but that seems unlikely after its ruling that bump stocks do not violate it. Each court\u2019s deliberations on a separate device have given little or no weight to the matter that the technology to harness a weapon\u2019s recoil was only <\/a>invented in the twenty-first century<\/a>.<\/p>\n The actual intent of the 1934 law, along with another law passed more than fifty years later, seems to have gone overlooked. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed a law<\/a> to expand overall gun rights while further restricting fully automatic weapons.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home,\u201d said then-President Reagan<\/a>, also a former governor of California,\u00a0 in 1989 just a month after five grade-school children, who had been displaced as refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam, were targeted and killed by a shooter armed with an AK-style semi-automatic rifle in Stockton California.<\/p>\n Today, countless YouTube videos show gun experts testing rifles with forced trigger resets against military rifles like the Vietnam war-era M16. The tester in almost every case seems to marvel at how a converted AR-15, for instance, continuously fires as many rounds<\/a> as fast, if not faster<\/a>, than an M16.<\/p>\n These changes come during a time of unprecedented political turmoil, as the Trump Administration has rolled back<\/a> civil liberties at home and violated norms<\/a> abroad. They follow promises by President Donald Trump\u2019s and some of his followers to exact retribution<\/a> against his enemies\u2014including threats to investigate not only political rivals but even entertainers<\/a> who have criticized him, including icons such as Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen.<\/p>\n None of this is normal. Despite America\u2019s already superlative history of gun violence, the nation\u2019s future has rarely looked so dangerous.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The United States has long suffered the highest incidence of gun violence in the developed world. But the conditions surrounding gun ownership in the United States may soon get even worse, owing to recent actions by the Trump Administration that will make already powerful weapons like AR-15 rifles even more lethal. And all this is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":272753,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12022],"tags":[2708,16930,12795,98924,6830,98923,42442,1952,23788,46470],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-272752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activist","tag-america","tag-dispatches","tag-donald-trump","tag-frank-smyth","tag-gun","tag-gun-laws","tag-gun-violence","tag-machine","tag-politics-government","tag-progressive-org"],"yoast_head":"\n