Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford announced this week he is joining a coalition of 15 other Democratic attorneys general in a lawsuit against the Trump administration to stop the redistribution of devices that the lawsuit claims enable firearms to fire like machine guns.

The Democrat’s latest lawsuit particularly targets the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and its plans to redistribute forced reset triggers to the individuals they were taken from across the United States.

“If the ATF distributes these devices across the country, not only will the agency run afoul of federal law, it will also put Americans at risk of further gun violence across the country,” Ford said in a statement.

Forced reset triggers automatically reset triggers to a firing position after each shot, allowing normal guns to fire at a rate that exceeds many military-grade automatic weapons, firing up to 20 rounds per second, according to Ford’s office.

Forced reset triggers are similar to bump stocks in that they also increase a weapon’s rate of fire, but they differ in the mechanism. Forced reset triggers use a trigger mechanism, and a bump stock is a replacement shoulder stock for semi-automatic rifles that not only resets the trigger but also fires as long as the bump stock is engaged. Bump stocks are federally legal, though some states have their own laws prohibiting them — including Nevada, which implemented the ban following the Oct. 1, 2017 mass shooting.

Since at least 1975, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives classified devices that operate similarly to forced reset triggers as “machine guns” prohibited by federal law. Lawsuits sought to challenge that prohibition in recent years, and multiple federal judges issued different rulings on whether forced reset triggers qualified as machine guns under federal law.

On May 16, the Trump administration announced it settled those lawsuits and removed the federal prohibition on forced reset triggers. The agency agreed to end its enforcement actions and appeals, redistribute previously seized forced reset triggers and allow for sales to continue.

“This Department of Justice believes that the 2nd Amendment is not a second-class right,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi in a May statement. “And we are glad to end a needless cycle of litigation with a settlement that will enhance public safety.”

One part of the agreement includes that Rare Breed Triggers, a Texas-based manufacturer of triggers for firearms, will not develop or design forced reset triggers for use in any pistol, and the company will also enforce its patents to prevent infringement, according to the Department of Justice.

Rare Breed Triggers called a settlement a “landmark victory for gun owners.” It hard argued that forced reset triggers defied the definition of a machine gun because it cannot fire more than one round by a “single function” of the trigger.

The attorneys general’s lawsuit argues forced reset triggers are prohibited by federal law and that they pose significant harms to the public. Once the devices are redistributed, it will be nearly impossible to retrieve them, the attorneys general argue.

“Despite declaring in recent years that FRTs pose a serious public safety risk, ATF has not only promised to abandon enforcing federal law against the distribution and possession of FRTs: it has decided to distribute thousands of these dangerous devices into communities around the country,” the lawsuit reads.

The other states part of the lawsuit are Delaware, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

State of New Jersey v. Bondi (FRTs) – Compl. (File-stamped) by hill23602 on Scribd

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