Essay

FRTs and the Case Against the Machine Gun Ban: Credit to Matthew Hoover

Matthew Hoover argues that FRTs, now legal and widely owned, show the 1986 machine gun ban isn’t what keeps Americans safe. Here’s his case and where it stands.

Matthew Hoover, the creator of CRS Firearms, has spent years examining the practical and legal edges of firearms regulation. In a recent video on his new channel, The CRS Report, he makes a pointed argument about Forced Reset Triggers (FRTs) and what their real-world use implies for the long-standing federal ban on machine guns under the National Firearms Act and the Gun Control Act. The video is here: https://youtu.be/1YrwwT898tU. His channel is The CRS Report: https://www.youtube.com/@THECRSREPORT.

The argument is worth taking seriously on its own terms. It does not require accepting every conclusion Hoover draws, but it does require confronting the logic he presents.

The Perception Gap

From the standpoint of many anti-gun politicians and advocacy groups, an FRT is functionally a machine-gun conversion device. These triggers use the cycling of the bolt carrier group to force the trigger forward after each shot. The shooter can then fire follow-up rounds at a high rate by maintaining finger pressure, producing a sound and rate of fire that is difficult for an observer to distinguish from fully automatic fire. Critics have treated FRTs, bump stocks, and similar devices as effectively equivalent to the machine guns that the 1986 Hughes Amendment and the NFA registration scheme were intended to restrict.

Hoover’s observation is that this perception is now widespread enough to serve as a test. If regulators and opponents view FRTs as essentially machine-gun conversion devices, then the experience of Americans who have owned and used them in significant numbers supplies evidence about what happens when such capability is broadly available.

What the Record Shows

FRTs have circulated among civilian owners for years. They have been the subject of ATF enforcement actions, lawsuits, a July 2024 federal district-court ruling in Texas (National Association for Gun Rights v. Garland) that they do not meet the statutory definition of a machine gun, and a May 2025 Department of Justice settlement with Rare Breed Triggers that ended federal enforcement treating qualifying FRTs as machine guns. Throughout this period, large numbers of Americans have possessed and used them; in January 2023, ATF itself estimated that more than 80,000 of Rare Breed’s FRT-15s alone were in circulation. No public data shows a corresponding, measurable increase in the overall rate of firearm crime, in the number or lethality of illegal shootings, or in mass-casualty events specifically attributable to FRTs. ATF has not published FRT-specific crime figures.

This is the empirical core of the argument. If devices that anti-gun observers treat as machine-gun equivalents can proliferate without producing the surge in deadly illegal violence that the machine-gun ban is presumed to prevent, then the ban itself is not delivering the public-safety benefit claimed for it. The absence of that surge is relevant evidence. It undercuts the assumption that restricting rapid-fire capability is a necessary or effective tool for reducing unlawful shootings.

Common Use and “Dangerous and Unusual”

Supreme Court doctrine since District of Columbia v. Heller has treated the Second Amendment as protecting arms that are in common use for lawful purposes, while recognizing a historical tradition of prohibiting “dangerous and unusual” weapons. As Justice Alito wrote in Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016), that is a conjunctive test: a weapon may not be banned unless it is both dangerous and unusual. Machine guns have long been placed outside that protection on the ground that they are unusual among civilian owners and especially dangerous; Heller itself suggested that “M-16 rifles and the like” may be banned. The Hughes Amendment, part of the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act, closed the registry to newly made machine guns for civilians, freezing the supply of transferable machine guns at pre-1986 levels and thereby helping to keep them “unusual.”

Hoover’s point is that the FRT experience undermines that classification. If FRTs are treated by opponents as machine-gun conversion devices, and if they have entered common civilian use without producing the predicted increase in criminal lethality, then the premise that true machine guns are inherently too dangerous for civilian ownership loses force. The same logic that would classify an FRT as a restricted conversion device would, on the observed record, support treating actual machine guns as arms that can exist in common use without the catastrophic consequences once assumed. The ban does not appear to be the factor preventing a crime wave; the low rate of illegal use of rapid-fire capability by the civilian population appears to be independent of the ban.

The courts have not accepted that argument yet. Federal appeals courts continue to uphold the machine-gun ban, and in July 2026 a federal judge in Texas dismissed a direct challenge to the Hughes Amendment brought by the Temple Gun Club; that case is now on appeal to the Fifth Circuit. Congress, meanwhile, cut the federal NFA tax on suppressors and short-barreled rifles to $0 starting in 2026, but left the $200 tax and the 1986 freeze on machine guns in place. That is exactly why arguments grounded in the observable record matter.

Taking the Argument on Its Merits

The claim is not that every FRT owner is a model of restraint, or that no FRT has ever been misused. It is that the aggregate pattern—widespread possession of devices opponents equate with machine-gun conversion technology, without a corresponding rise in deadly illegal shootings—supplies evidence against the efficacy of the machine-gun ban. That evidence is relevant to both the policy justification for the ban and to the constitutional question of whether machine guns can still be labeled “dangerous and unusual” once a close practical analogue has become common without the feared results.

Hoover deserves credit for stating the argument clearly and for tying it to the observable record rather than to abstract theory alone. Viewers can evaluate the video and the underlying data for themselves. The channel continues to cover related developments in firearms law and technology.

From a perspective focused on liberty and justice, the question is straightforward. Restrictions on the peaceful ownership and use of arms require a demonstrated connection to the prevention of actual harm. When devices that regulators themselves treat as near-equivalents to banned machine guns circulate widely without producing the predicted increase in unlawful lethality, the justification for continuing to treat true machine guns as categorically outside the scope of common use becomes harder to sustain. Evaluating policies by the actual harm they prevent—or fail to prevent—rather than by the category labels attached to the arms is the more reliable standard.