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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29432 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Associated Press: Kansas judge throws out machine gun possession charge, cites Second Amendment

A federal judge in Kansas has tossed out a machine gun possession charge and questioned if bans on the weapons violate the Second Amendment.

If upheld on appeal, the ruling by U.S. District Judge John W. Broomes in Wichita could have a sweeping impact on the regulation of machine guns, including homemade automatic weapons that many police and prosecutors blame for fueling gun violence.

The actual opinion, however, paints a rather different picture.

To summarize, in this case, the government has not met its burden under Bruen and Rahimi to demonstrate through historical analogs that regulation of the weapons at issue in this case are consistent with the nation’s history of firearms regulation. Indeed, the government has barely tried to meet that burden.

 

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 [the ban on machine guns].

The excitement is worthy because this may be the first time that the NFA and regulation of machine guns has been found unconstitutional at all, and thus the ball shifted to the government's court to dig into the archives and research the historical basis for restrictions of this sort.

I'm not entirely sure what they'll find, but it seems like a heavy lift at first glance.

Whether the government "barely tried" due to laziness or they did try and realized they had a losing argument and thus simply threw in the towel might be up for debate.

It does seem so, considering that 'guns with greater than normal rates of fire' (the most direct analogy) did not in fact get regulated more strongly as they were invented.

There's probably a lot to fight over what exactly makes a weapon 'fully automatic' in a mechanical sense, but yes, as far as I know rate of fire has never been a subject of regulation PRIOR to the NFA.

Doesn't matter; they need only the barest fig leaf. The acceptance in Rahimi of "going armed to the terror of the public" vitiates Bruen. Applying it to purchase and possession as opposed to public carry will need a little more wordsmithing, but I'm sure 8 of the 9 can manage it.

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