Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings joins other attorneys general to prevent machine gun conversion devices to be distributed in Delaware and other states.
Jennings and a coalition of AGs formalized an agreement to prevent the Trump Administration from distributing the devices in 17 states including Delaware.
The coalition co-led by Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland filed a notice of voluntary dismissal Friday against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the U.S. Department of Justice and several manufactures and sellers of forced reset triggers (FRTs).
The filing comes after securing the agreement not to return or sell thousands of seized FRTs in the coalition states because they are illegal.
FRTs increase the firearms rate of fire, and they allow even novice shooters to have the firepower of a military machine gun.
“This is a seismic public safety win for Delaware and for all of the states in this coalition,” said Attorney General Kathy Jennings. “The federal government didn’t just abdicate its law enforcement responsibility to police these devices—it was prepared to actively flood our communities with weapons of war capable of firing hundreds of bullets per minute. They would have killed innocent people, period. This lawsuit stopped them. I’m grateful to our sister states and their teams who helped prevent catastrophe in our neighborhoods.”
The initial complaint was filed by the coalition last June, followed by a motion for preliminary injunction and an amended complaint.
The defendants responded by committing not to return FRTs into those states and offering owners in those states three options.
They included that owners may request that ATF transfer the device to them in a state where it’s legal to possess, transfer the device to a third party in a state where it’s legal or withdraw the request and abandon the device to ATF to destroy.
A FRT possessed in or transported to Delaware can draw violations ranging from misdemeanors punishable by 6 months in prison and/or a $1,150 fine for a first offense up to felonies punishable up to 5 years in prison for repeat offenders.
Jennings co-led this lawsuit together with the attorneys general of New Jersey and Maryland. They were joined by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Hawai’i, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia.
