Federal judge: Machinegun ban is unconstitutional
A federal district court Judge from Mississippi has ruled that the federal prohibition banning private ownership of machineguns made after April 1986 violates Second Amendment protections of the U.S. Constitution.
In 1986, the Hughes Amendment was added to the Gun Owners Protection Act (GOPA) as a poison pill. A poison pill is an amendment added to a bill to guarantee failure, but in the case of the GOPA, the bill passed with the poison pill attached. The Hughes Amendment closed the National Firearms Act (NFA) registry for new machineguns. It amended 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(o) and 924(a)(2) of the federal statute.
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In 2022, Justin Bryce Brown was arrested for owning unregistered machineguns made after 1986. Facing ten years in prison, Mr. Brown’s lawyer filed a motion for dismissal, claiming that the machinegun prohibition law violated their client’s Second Amendment-protected rights. Judge Colton Reeves begrudgingly granted the defense’s request. He cited that he was bound by Supreme Court precedent.
Per the ruling:
“Mr. Brown’s argument was once foreclosed by decades of precedent. Not anymore. In 2022, the Supreme Court ‘established a new historical paradigm for analyzing Second Amendment claims.'”
The judge is discussing the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, which states that courts can use only the text, tradition, and history of the Second Amendment to determine whether gun law is constitutional.
The Second Amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
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The first question is if Mr. Brown is part of “the people.” He is over 18, the age of majority in the United States. This means he is part of the political class and, therefore, part of “the people.” The next step is to determine if the arm in question is protected. In Heller, SCOTUS said that “dangerous and unusual” weapons could be banned. The judge determined that machineguns are dangerous, but so is every firearm since they can do bodily harm.
The judge then looked at whether machineguns are “unusual.” Unusual means an arm is not in common use. There are over 744,000 machineguns in private hands. In another case, the courts said 500,000 stun guns in circulation was enough to constitute “in common use.” Lawyers for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) tried to argue that only arms in common use during the 1790s were protected. The judge rejected the argument since if he accepted it, the government could ban any firearm that is not a musket or carbine.
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Since the judge determined that Brown was part of the people and that machineguns were protected arms, the man’s actions were presumably constitutional. The burden of proof shifts to the state to provide historical analogues to prove a law is consistent with the history and tradition of the nation’s firearms regulations. SCOTUS said in Rahimi that a law from the founding era doesn’t have to be a historical twin, but it has to be similar. The government failed to provide any laws that the court found useful.
Judge Reeves had no choice but to dismiss the case. The decision applies only to the defendant since this was a criminal case. Mr. Brown doesn’t get his firearms and ammunition back from the police. Those were taken through the civil forfeiture case, United States of America v. Five (5) Pistols et al.
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