BOSTON — Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell is among a group of Democrats challenging the Trump administration’s decision to drop federal restrictions on machine gun conversions and return thousands of previously seized devices.
A multistate lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Maryland by Campbell and 15 other attorneys general seeks to stop the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from “redistributing” the devices, which allow semiautomatic weapons to be converted into machine guns.
“This reckless decision will not only endanger the public – putting people nationwide at greater risk of deadly violence – but is contrary to federal law,” the AGs wrote in the 32-page complaint.
The lawsuit stems from an agreement May 16 between the ATF and Rare Breed Triggers, a company that makes devices known as forced reset triggers.
In 2022, the ATF ordered the company to halt sales and declared that FRTs are considered machine guns under federal law, which made them subject to tighter restrictions. At the time, the Rare Breed disputed the ATF’s policy and continued selling its devices, prompting the federal government to sue.
But the Trump administration, which took over the White House in January, directed the ATF and the Department of Justice to settle the case with Rare Breed Triggers, saying it “avoids the need for continued appeals” and “continued litigation in other, related cases concerning the same issue.”
Campbell blasted the ATF’s move as a “direct assault on every American’s inalienable right to feel safe in their homes, schools, and grocery stores –free from the fear or threat of gun violence.”
“Weapons of war and tools of mass destruction like FRTs have no place or purpose in everyday society – nor in any home, community, or school within the commonwealth,” she said in a statement.
In the lawsuit, the AGs said that despite previously declaring FRTs a “serious public safety risk”, the ATF has “not only promised to abandon enforcing federal law … it has decided to distribute thousands of these dangerous devices into communities around the country.”
Many of the states involved in the lawsuit, including Massachusetts, have laws that prohibit the sale or possession of machine gun conversion kits. The AGs said returning the devices to gun owners in their states will cause “dramatic and irreversible harms” if the ATF’s order is allowed to stand.
“Thousands of weapons their own laws prohibit will be directly distributed within their borders, and they will have to expend substantial resources to enforce those laws to confiscate these very same illegal items,” they wrote.
The National Association for Gun Rights, which filed a lawsuit to block federal restrictions on the devices, slammed the lawsuit as “political lawfare” by blue states and said it expects the court to reject the legal challenge.
“A federal court already ruled the government unlawfully seized thousands of legal triggers from law-abiding Americans – a decision that the ATF now acknowledges and accepts,” Hannah Hill, the association’s vice president, said in a statement. “These states lack standing to file this lawsuit, and they know it. This suit is just reckless political lawfare.”
Christian M. Wade covers the Massachusetts Statehouse for North of Boston Media Group’s newspapers and websites. Email him at cwade@cnhinews.com.