Federal Court Tosses Auto Weapon Charges On 2nd Amendment Grounds

Shooting News Weekly reports that "District Court Tosses Machine Gun Possession Charge, Rules They’re ‘Bearable Arms’." 

District Judge John Broomes ruled that the the government failed to meet its burdern [sic] under Bruen and Rahimi to show historical analogues for banning the kind of machine guns possessed by the defendant (a converted AR platform rifle and a GLOCK switch-equipped pistol). In fact, it doesn’t sound like they tried very hard.

Indeed, the government has barely tried to meet that burden. And the Supreme Court has indicated that the Bruen analysis is not merely a suggestion.

Ouch.

Importantly, this decision says little about what the government might prove in some future case. Rather, under Bruen’s framework for evaluating Second Amendment challenges, it is the government’s burden to identify a historical analog to the restrictions challenged in this case. This the government has failed to do. The court expresses no opinion as to whether the government could, in some other case, meet its burden to show a historically analogous restriction that would justify [18 U.S.C.] § 922.

In fact, the district court's reasoning is in line with the reasoning of United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), which upheld restrictions under the NFA on short barreled shotguns only because they were not weapons that would used by a militia or for the common defense. In my opinion, under the reasoning of Miller, the NFA restrictions on firearms should never have been held Constitutional (other than for short barreled shotguns). While Miller has been used to support the theory that the 2nd Amendment only provided for a collective right to weapons (see, e.g., United States v. Neal, No. 20 CR 335 (N.D. Ill. Feb. 7, 2024)), that was not at issue before the Miller court. Rather, the issue in Miller had to do with the type of weapon: whether it was something that would be used by a militia or in the common defense. A point brought up in D.C. v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 622 (2008).

    It is also notable, when reading the district court's decision, that the court's reasoning revolves around the distinction between possession of a restricted weapon and what one does with the weapon. This is because the historical examples cited by the government concerned cases where a person both was carrying a dangerous and unusual weapon, and going about terrorizing the public with it; whereas the defendant before the court had only been charged with possession.