Are Forced Reset Triggers Legal in New Mexico?

New Mexico's 2025 House Bill 8 created an offense for knowingly possessing or transporting an unlawfully obtained weapon conversion device. The enacted definition addresses a device designed and intended to convert a semiautomatic firearm so that it fires automatically more than one shot for a single trigger function.

Both the automatic-fire definition and the offense's unlawfully-obtained limitation should be applied as written rather than replaced with a generic rate-increasing-trigger category.

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 2026-07-28. 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.