The language of ATF Ruling 2026-2, approved June 15, 2026 and effective July 2 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), is legalistic and a bit dry. But what it settles for a novel non-lethal technology now in American law enforcement is substantial.
With that decision, the ATF determined Wrap Technologies’ BolaWrap 150 — a handheld remote-restraint device that helps officers control uncooperative subjects without pain compliance — is neither a firearm nor any other type of weapon as defined by relevant federal laws.
This eliminates ambiguity and previous inconsistencies around the device’s classification and should make it more available to law enforcement-adjacent markets like private security and corrections, as well as international markets. For law enforcement agencies it should shorten purchasing cycles. What the ruling doesn’t do is answer any question about how the device may lawfully be used, and the last sections of this article cover that.
“It’s changing a lot of conversations for us,” said Jared Novick, Wrap’s president and COO. “We really felt, over the course of years, having a track record of zero fatalities, zero serious injuries and zero lawsuits, we had enough of a track record to bring to the ATF for review. And when they really dug into it, they determined this is an instrument of restraint, not a weapon with an intent to harm.”
A category question, answered
The BolaWrap 150 fills an unintentional gap in law enforcement response between verbal direction and the force of less-lethal options like chemical devices, conducted energy weapons and impact munitions. That gap left officers no real method to restrain a noncompliant subject without pain and risk of injury.
The BolaWrap 150 fills an unintentional gap in law enforcement response between verbal direction and the force of less-lethal options like chemical devices, conducted energy weapons and impact munitions. That gap left officers no real method to restrain a noncompliant subject without pain and risk of injury.
Wrap Technologies
From a recommended range of 10–25 feet, the BolaWrap 150 propels a Kevlar tether that wraps around the legs or arms and torso, restricting the subject’s movement so officers can take them more safely into custody. Ten feet is a hard floor rather than a guideline: The manufacturer’s guide prohibits deployment inside that distance, because the risk of an anchor detaching and causing a penetration injury to the subject or a bystander goes up. A white LED on the platform comes on at activation to draw the subject’s eye to the device at the moment of deployment.
The approach reduces close-quarters contact for officers, and in the nearly five years since the 150 was unveiled in October 2021, Wrap reports no fatalities and no serious injuries from its use.
While the device propels the tether, it is not a firearm. It uses an electrically activated propellant charge inside a replaceable cassette, with no trigger, hammer, sear or firing pin. But it had enough similarities to a firearm to leave some confusion about whether it was subject to key federal laws, specifically the Gun Control Act and its definition of firearm (18 U.S.C. § 921(a)(3)); the National Firearms Act (NFA) and its definitions of firearms and other weapons (26 U.S.C. §§ 5845(a) and 5845(e)); and implementation guidance for both (27 CFR §§ 478.11 and 479.11).
ATF settled it by applying a definition it did not write. In 2025 the Supreme Court, in Bondi v. VanDerStok, described a weapon as “an instrument of offensive or defensive combat.” Measured against that standard, ATF found the BolaWrap 150 “is not an instrument of combat; rather, the BolaWrap 150 is merely an instrument of restraint.” The agency noted the Kevlar tether is designed to minimize the risk of injury, that the anchors are intended to engage fabric rather than skin, and that the device “is ineffective in employing deadly or non-deadly force on the subject for the purpose of debilitating a subject by pain or injury.”
That last finding is the one worth keeping. A federal agency examining the device for an unrelated purpose reached its own conclusion about how the thing works, which is that it does not work by pain.
Its predecessor, the BolaWrap 100, used a .380 partial blank along with a hammer, sear and firing pin, a far more conventional firing mechanism. The 150 changed the mechanism, but without federal clarity Wrap continued to treat the device as a firearm and comply accordingly.
There were two parts to that.
“The first was the operational and logistical concerns of moving firearms,” explained Novick. “That meant as a company, we had to get something called an FFL, a federal firearms license to manufacture firearms, register the serial codes and abide by the federal laws on shipping firearms from certain locations and the certain ways they can be received. And it limited our market largely to just law enforcement, because they could accept firearms.”
Beyond that, more uncertainty came from the NFA’s additional class of “any other weapon,” defined as a weapon or device capable of being concealed on the person, from which a shot can be discharged through the energy of an explosive. The practical effect for Wrap was a market limit rather than a prohibition on any individual. Contracts for unarmed security often bar those personnel from carrying firearms, so a device classified as one could not be issued under such a contract, and the transfer and registration requirements added cost on top of it.
“It encumbered our organization with costs and barriers to move into certain markets and ship things a certain way,” Novick said.
How things changed
Treating a device that was neither a firearm nor weapon as both was raising costs, impeding sales and keeping a useful tool out of people’s hands, so as safe deployments of the BolaWrap 150 mounted, Wrap sought a review of its federal classification. This posed significant hoops to jump through; the company had to seek insights from experts, get to the right people, provide technical data, answer questions and demonstrate the technology. Then there was a quiet period while the ATF considered things.
Its June decision was welcome but a bit of a surprise.
“As president of the company, I was optimistic it would happen, but sometimes there’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to this stuff when you’re outside looking in,” Novick said. “So even though it made sense to me that it should not be a firearm, I didn’t know what logic they were going to use to conclude it wasn’t or substantiate that it was. We represented its capabilities and intention, but we had no insight into the internal thought process.”
For police and other users, the ruling should compress key intervals and get the BolaWrap 150 into their hands faster. A firearm classification meant extra review steps and limited purchase pathways, as well as processing periods for customers overseas. Now, as what ATF called “merely an instrument of restraint,” the BolaWrap 150 may be obtainable through standard evaluation, a purchase order and approval against a standard safety or non-lethal budget line, with no FFL dealer requirement and no weapons appropriation. Agencies will want to confirm that against their own procurement rules, which the ruling does not reach.
Wrap projects the change will shorten domestic sales cycles from 3–9 months down to 4–8 weeks, and international cycles from 4–6 months to as little as 4–8 weeks.
The company is also looking to new markets, four in particular: corrections and detention; gun-free civilian environments such as schools, hospitals, stadiums and government buildings; international sales; and, intriguingly, autonomous response platforms. Those are Wrap’s projections rather than ATF findings. A classification change removes a federal barrier to purchase. It grants nobody authority to restrain anybody, and that authority still comes from state law, facility policy, an employer or the law of self-defense.
“It’s a big change internationally,” Novick noted, “because a lot of countries look to what the U.S. does to classify things.”
New tools are coming quickly
With the legal question settled for the handheld device, expect autonomous response platforms to develop quickly. One is already here: Wrap‘s DFR-X carries a six-cassette payload on a drone for use in DFR operations.
“We can now really put this cassette anywhere: on drones, ground robots, handheld devices or any application we can think of.”
That’s an important leap forward in capability, turning a tool previously used only for observation and awareness into one that can physically assist apprehension. “SWAT and Tier 1 military units like that for room clearing,” Novick noted. It also opens up drone-to-drone counter-UAS possibilities through entangling the props of hostile craft.
“The ATF’s ruling, to be clear, talked only about this yellow piece of injection-molded plastic with some electronics. It said nothing about this cassette where the Kevlar tether is,” said Novick. “That means we can now really put this cassette anywhere: on drones, ground robots, handheld devices or any application we can think of.”
An important caveat is that the ATF’s ruling is limited to the BolaWrap 150 and doesn’t specifically extend to the DFR-X or other devices. However, the reasoning ATF applied turned on the tether and anchors, which are housed in the cassette rather than in the handheld platform. On that basis Wrap expects the same analysis to hold for other devices deploying the cassette, though each platform may require its own determination. Drone deployment raises a separate set of FAA and other regulatory questions, and the ATF’s determination may influence any eventual FAA decision about a weapon/nonweapon distinction.
In July the company unveiled the Wraptor MX, a multishot restraint platform designed to deliver three consecutive BolaWrap deployments. Wrap has selected up to 10 law enforcement agencies for pre-commercial access through an early adopter program. Like the BolaWrap 150, the Wraptor incorporates visual and auditory elements, and it’s designed to add additional technologies in the future.
Together the BolaWrap 150, Wraptor MX and DFR-X form the non-lethal response layer of Wrap’s WrapShield platform, extending remote-restraint capabilities across multiple environments with the BolaWrap cassette at the core.
What the ruling does not change
The ruling answers one question cleanly. Agencies adopting the device should be equally clear about the four it leaves untouched.
State law: A federal classification under the firearms statutes is not a finding about state law. A state may regulate the platform on its own terms regardless of what ATF concluded, and the federal answer is not the whole answer.
Reasonableness: Classification and reasonableness are separate questions with separate answers. ATF decided whether the device is a weapon. It did not decide whether any particular deployment is reasonable under Graham v. Connor, and nothing in the ruling changes that analysis for an agency or an officer.
Policy and reporting: The ruling sets nothing in an agency’s use-of-force policy and moves nothing in its reporting categories. Those belong to the agency, and an agency fielding the device should decide deliberately how a deployment gets documented rather than letting a federal classification settle it by default.
Authority: No classification grants authority to anyone. The authority to restrain a person comes from the state, the facility, the employer or the law of self-defense, and none of that moved in June.
Where the training sits
The ruling reaches procurement. It does not reach the range, and the range is where an agency’s exposure actually lives. Two points carry more weight than the rest.
The first is the deployment floor. The manufacturer prohibits deployment inside 10 feet, and that is a hard number rather than a recommendation.
The second is the announcement. A deployment produces a loud report, and the method Wrap teaches has the officer announce the deployment immediately before the tether goes, with words like “deploying non-lethal.” The announcement does three things at once: It tells other officers on scene that a deployment is coming. It tells them the sound they are about to hear is not gunfire. And it tells everyone else present, including anyone recording, that what they are watching is not an officer shooting somebody. An agency that has standardized its own announcement should use that one. What no agency should do is leave the words to chance.
Building for an autonomous future
ATF Ruling 2026-2 is narrow, but its implications may prove large, especially as the world grows more autonomous. What it settles is a question that had been open since the first BolaWrap shipped: whether a device that restrains without pain belongs in the same federal category as a weapon. ATF’s answer was that it does not, and it got there by applying a definition the Supreme Court had already written rather than by inventing a category of its own.
“Machines are having more and more of an impact,” Novick noted. “Industries are being transformed. We have driverless cars and surgeons in L.A. operating remotely on the knees of people in Florida. Undoubtedly, public safety is going to become more autonomous as well. So we’re trying to have enough forethought that what we’re doing today can have a home in a more autonomous future.
“It’s not a stretch to consider the future of drones and DFR and how we might expand the boundaries there. Many times I think technology is in front of the law, and the law catches up. So if we can, constitutionally, morally and responsibly, push that edge as a company, that’s a good place to be, because it means we’re doing something good for our customer base. That’s what we want to be doing.”
For more information, visit wrap.com.
BolaWrap is a registered trademark of Wrap Technologies. DFR-X, Wraptor MX and WrapShield are trademarks of Wrap Technologies.
