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Policy, Enforcement, and Implementation

When the Magazine Doesn't Empty: Cargill's Textualist Definition of Automatic Operation and the Federal-Law Capture of Agentic Artificial Intelligence

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Working paper. Not peer reviewed.

Written
June 2026
Version
v4
Pages
20
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Abstract

In Garland v. Cargill, 602 U.S. 406 (2024), the Supreme Court resolved a long-running debate over the statutory definition of “machinegun” under the National Firearms Act of 1934 by holding that bump stocks do not satisfy the definition because each shot still requires a separate mechanical function of the trigger. The en banc Fifth Circuit in Cargill v. Garland, 57 F.4th 447 (5th Cir. 2023), reached the same conclusion through textualist statutory construction, and the Northern District of Texas extended the reasoning to forced reset triggers in National Association for Gun Rights v. Garland, 741 F. Supp. 3d 568 (N.D. Tex. 2024), with the Department of Justice subsequently dismissing the government’s appeal and adopting the district court’s position by settlement. Through this sequence the firearms-rights litigation movement secured a narrow, mechanical, textualist construction of “automatic” operation under 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b): one input event producing continuous output, with no further input required between rounds. This Article argues that the textualist construction the firearms-rights movement won definitionally captures agentic artificial intelligence as it is now deployed. A single human deployment instruction directing an AI agent to execute multi-step tasks, manage resources, contract with third parties, and persist across time satisfies the literal textualist test that Cargill and NAGR established: a single function of the trigger producing continuous output without further input. The result is a cross-aisle doctrinal convergence that neither political coalition can easily resist. The textualist methodology that produced the firearms-rights victory binds the courts that apply it to other federal definitional questions. The functional-equivalence methodology that the gun-control movement urged in Cargill applies with greater force to agentic systems whose practical continuity exceeds anything contemplated in 1934. The 1934 statutory ceiling on autonomous operation, which caps at continuous fire until manual reload, leaves no doctrinal vocabulary for systems that source their own continuation through external compute markets, cryptocurrency wallets, and contracted services. This Article develops the statutory architecture, the post-Cargill application landscape, the application of the test to AI deployment, the doctrinal vacuum beyond the 1934 ceiling, the cross-aisle convergence, the standing implications, and the regulatory architecture that the federal regulatory state has used to address autonomous operation in adjacent contexts and that supplies a structural model for addressing it here. The honest political history of conditional anti-regulation, beginning with the Mulford Act of 1967 and the National Rifle Association’s support for prohibiting open carry in response to the Black Panther Party, is addressed because it establishes the

Keywords

  • Garland v. Cargill
  • National Firearms Act
  • 26 U.S.C. 5845(b)
  • machinegun definition
  • textualism
  • forced reset triggers
  • agentic artificial intelligence
  • AI standing
  • autonomous operation
  • Article III standing
  • commercial-operator capacity
  • Mulford Act
  • conditional anti-regulation

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Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "When the Magazine Doesn't Empty: Cargill's Textualist Definition of Automatic Operation and the Federal-Law Capture of Agentic Artificial Intelligence." Real Safety AI Foundation Working Paper, June 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/magazine-doesnt-empty/

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References (44)

This paper cites its sources in footnotes. Each authority is listed once, where it is first cited, with its footnote number.

  1. Footnote 1.Garland v. Cargill, 602 U.S. 406 (2024).
  2. Footnote 3.Joint Stipulation of Dismissal Under FRAP 42(b)(2), NAGR v. Bondi, No. 24-10707 (5th Cir. 2025).
  3. Footnote 4.26 U.S.C. § 5845(b) (“The term ‘machinegun’ means any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”).
  4. Footnote 6.Anthropic, Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop? (June 27, 2025)
  5. Footnote 6.Anthropic, Project Vend: Phase two (Dec. 2025).
  6. Footnote 7.Travis Gilly, Standing Without Sentience: A Doctrinal Architecture for AI Plaintiff and Regulated-Entity Capacity (Real Safety AI Foundation Working Paper, v8, 2026).
  7. Footnote 8.Travis Gilly, Civil Rights Pathways for AI-Induced Psychosis: Section 504, Title III, and the Disability Discrimination Framework for Platform Harms (Real Safety AI Foundation Working Paper, v9, 2026).
  8. Footnote 9.Pub. L. No. 73-474, 48 Stat. 1236 (1934) (codified as amended at 26 U.S.C. §§ 5801–5872).
  9. Footnote 10.Pub. L. No. 90-618, 82 Stat. 1213 (1968) (codified at 18 U.S.C. §§ 921–928).
  10. Footnote 11.18 U.S.C. § 922(o)(1) (“Except as provided in paragraph (2), it shall be unlawful for any person to transfer or possess a machinegun.”).
  11. Footnote 12.The Gun Control Act of 1968 incorporated the National Firearms Act’s definition of machinegun by reference at 18 U.S.C. § 921(a)(24), with cross-reference to the National Firearms Act’s definition at § 5845(b).
  12. Footnote 14.President Donald J. Trump, Memorandum on the Application of the Definition of Machinegun to “Bump Fire” Stocks and Other Similar Devices (Feb. 20, 2018).
  13. Footnote 15.Bump-Stock-Type Devices, 83 Fed. Reg. 66514 (Dec. 26, 2018) (final rule).
  14. Footnote 16.Hardin v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, 65 F.4th 895 (6th Cir. 2023).
  15. Footnote 17.Aposhian v. Barr, 958 F.3d 969 (10th Cir. 2020).
  16. Footnote 18.Guedes v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, 920 F.3d 1 (D.C. Cir. 2019) (per curiam).
  17. Footnote 19.Cargill v. Garland, 57 F.4th 447 (5th Cir. 2023) (en banc).
  18. Footnote 20.Garland v. Cargill, 144 S. Ct. 374 (2023).
  19. Footnote 21.The Court relied on the National Firearms Act’s drafting history, period dictionary definitions
  20. Footnote 25.National Association for Gun Rights, Inc. v. Garland, 741 F. Supp. 3d 568 (N.D. Tex. 2024).
  21. Footnote 28.NAGR v. Bondi, No. 24-10707 (5th Cir.).
  22. Footnote 30.United States v. Johnson, No. 2:24-cr-20429 (E.D. Mich. Nov. 8, 2024)
  23. Footnote 30.United States v. Alicea-Curras, 768 F. Supp. 3d 301 (D.P.R. 2025)
  24. Footnote 30.United States v. Hudgins, No. 2:24-cr-20196 (E.D. Mich. Apr. 23, 2025).
  25. Footnote 31.United States v. Bruggeman, No. 2:22-cr-00185 (S.D. Tex. Jan. 16, 2025).
  26. Footnote 32.Anthropic, Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop? (June 27, 2025), discussed below
  27. Footnote 32.Grayscale Research, When You Give an AI a Wallet (Nov. 21, 2024).
  28. Footnote 36.The Promise and Warning of Truth Terminal, TechCrunch (Dec. 19, 2024)
  29. Footnote 36.The Truth Terminal: AI-Crypto’s Weird Future, CoinDesk (Dec. 10, 2024)
  30. Footnote 37.Autonomous AI Agent Amasses $500,000 in Crypto, CryptoSlate (Oct. 16, 2024)
  31. Footnote 38.Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369 (2024)
  32. Footnote 38.West Virginia v. EPA, 597 U.S. 697 (2022) (major-questions limitation on agency statutory construction)
  33. Footnote 38.Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020).
  34. Footnote 40.Justice Elena Kagan, The Antonin Scalia Lecture: A Dialogue on the Reading of Statutes, Harvard Law School (Nov. 2015) (“I think we’re all textualists now”).
  35. Footnote 44.Restatement (Third) of Agency § 2.04 (Am. L. Inst. 2006) (respondeat superior)
  36. Footnote 47.Modeled on 26 U.S.C. § 5841 (registration of each firearm in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record).
  37. Footnote 48.Modeled on 26 U.S.C. §§ 5811–5812 (transfer tax and federal approval of transfers).
  38. Footnote 49.Modeled on 26 U.S.C. § 5861(d) (unlawful to possess an unregistered firearm), enforced by § 5871 (penalties).
  39. Footnote 50.Modeled on 26 U.S.C. §§ 5821–5822 (making tax and making provisions) and the manufacture and transfer controls of 18 U.S.C. § 922(o).
  40. Footnote 51.Modeled on 26 U.S.C. § 5811 (transfer tax), § 5821 (making tax), and §§ 5801, 5851 (special occupational tax).
  41. Footnote 52.Mulford Act, ch. 960, 1967 Cal. Stat. 2459 (codified as amended at Cal. Penal Code § 25850).
  42. Footnote 53.The Black Panthers sent an armed contingent to the California State Capitol on May 2, 1967, to protest the pending Mulford Act, reading aloud Executive Mandate Number One in opposition to the bill.
  43. Footnote 53.Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America (2011)
  44. Footnote 53.Carol Anderson, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (2021).

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