Are Forced Reset Triggers Legal in Pennsylvania?

Pennsylvania's prohibited-offensive-weapons statute, 18 Pa.C.S. section 908, makes it a first-degree misdemeanor to make, repair, sell, deal in, use, or possess an offensive weapon, a term that includes machine guns. It does not separately name forced-reset triggers or generic rate-increasing-trigger devices.

The relevant boundary is whether a device places the resulting weapon within an existing regulated category such as a machine gun.

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.