Are Forced Reset Triggers Legal in New Mexico?

New Mexico's 2025 House Bill 8 created a third-degree felony for knowingly possessing or transporting an unlawfully obtained weapon conversion device, defined as a part or combination of parts designed and intended to convert a semiautomatic weapon into a fully automatic weapon.

The act defines a fully automatic weapon by firing more than one cartridge or shell, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger, and a semiautomatic weapon as one requiring a separate function of the trigger to fire each cartridge or shell.

Under the 2025 DOJ settlement with Rare Breed Triggers, an FRT fires one round per trigger function and is not an NFA machine gun federally. The settlement covers rifles and grip-forward pistols; it does not extend to grip-fed handguns (Glock, S&W M&P, Canik), whose federal FRT status remains less settled. State bans operate independently of federal law through broader state machine-gun, trigger-activator, or rate-of-fire definitions.

Federal baseline verified 2026-10-20. Scope: Forced reset triggers (Rare Breed FRT-15, Dairyland Defender, and similar) and forced-reset selectors (AR Super Safety, ARC-Fire). One round per trigger function. Binary triggers are a separate class.