A US District Judge in Mississippi rules that the ban on fully-automatic weapons violates the Bruen decision.

He wasn’t happy about it – but he made the ruling:

In his ruling, Judge Carlton Reeves, an Obama appointee, made no bones at all about the fact that he hated what he was doing, but under Bruen — of which he is also not a fan — the law is very clear.

The Supreme Court has, of course, ruled that gun control laws like the machinegun ban can be justified in the case of firearms that are “dangerous and unusual.” Judge Reeves, however, ruled that while machineguns are dangerous, they are not, in fact, unusual. And we can thank the work product of the great legal minds of the US Department of Justice for their failure to argue that machineguns are rare. As the judge noted . . .

Bruen nevertheless tells us that there is an American “historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’” 597 U.S. at 21 (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 626). That is the law to be followed. The ultimate problem for the government, then, is this: although machineguns are “dangerous,” it does not explain how machineguns are unusual.  …

The Morgan case raised by Mr. Brown says there were more than 740,000 machineguns lawfully possessed in the United States in 2021. 2024 WL 3936767, at *4 (citing ATF data). The government has not pointed to any other number. The Court accepts it as true.

Seven hundred and forty thousand is no small number.7  The government presents no argument or explanation for why such a large figure is somehow not common. Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines common as, among other things, “widespread.”8 Three-quarters of a million of any kind of firearm is plainly widespread. 

The government also failed to show any historical evidence that banning machineguns would be consistent with gun laws at the founding.

It appears the legal and legislative sharks are circling the National Firearms Act.

Don’t get irrationally exuberant just yet:

Let’s be clear here. This ruling came in a criminal case and applies only to Justin Brown. Don’t head over to your local gun store expecting to buy full auto M4 any time soon.

The question now is, what happens next…whether or not the DOJ chooses to appeal the case to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Yes, the Fifth is probably the most gun-friendly circuit in the nation. But they’ve also ruled in the past that machineguns are both dangerous and unusual. That, however, was before Bruen. And you can bet that if the Brown decision is appealed, the DOJ will come up with arguments supporting its contention that guns with giggle-switches are, in fact, rare.

 

So it’s too early to start shopping.

But not window-shopping.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, February 11th, 2025 at 4:11 am and is filed under Victim Disarmament. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.