Does the Second Amendment cover machine guns? That question has been asked since at least 1934, when the National Firearms Act (NFA) made them difficult to acquire legally – and therein lies a hint toward the answer: difficult, but not impossible. Last week, a Kansas judge took another stab at the issue. On August 21, US District Judge John Broomes dismissed two counts of unlawful possession of a machine gun, citing the Second Amendment and the Supreme Court rulings in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, Superintendent of New York State Police, et al. and United States v. Rahimi.
The constitutionality of the NFA – and any other federal firearm restrictions, for that matter – has been challenged by Second Amendment advocates since the first federal gun control laws were proposed. But there’s more to the question than simple legality; the right to keep and bear arms is and has always been a very political issue. What does the Second Amendment really mean? That one lingering question doesn’t seem to have an answer all Americans, or even all legal experts, can agree upon. But the other, which is just as important, is what the Second Amendment should say – or if it should even exist at all. As progressive lawmakers and anti-gun activists push for more government control, many states and the federal courts are moving in the opposite direction. Despite the increasingly well-organized and -funded movement to disarm Americans, is the Second Amendment making a comeback?
Second Amendment – Law of the Land in the Sunflower State
On October 17, 2022, Tamori Morgan possessed an “Anderson Manufacturing, model AM-15 .300 caliber machinegun” and a “machinegun conversion device” – a so-called “Glock switch” – according to prosecutors. He was indicted by a grand jury in April 2023 in Wichita, KS, and charged with two felonies that carried up to ten years in prison and as much as $250,000 in fines apiece.
Progressive Politics – The Name Says It All
What are “arms”? They’re weapons. Period. This includes swords, knives, firearms, etc. Even cannons – despite what President Joe Biden has often incorrectly stated – are and have always been perfectly legal for civilians to own. This understanding is reflected not only in court rulings throughout the years but also in the gun control laws themselves. The NFA, for example, does not ban machine gun ownership outright – and that wasn’t because the people who wrote the law didn’t want to. Rather, they understood that an all-out ban was unconstitutional and that it wouldn’t stand. Even when it was updated years later to prevent people from buying new machine guns manufactured after 1986, the right to own a fully automatic firearm wasn’t taken away entirely – just further limited. Still, to this day, if one has the money, the time, and a clean background, one can still legally buy a machine gun. Even in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton signed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban into law, there were a couple of caveats. Anyone who already owned a soon-to-be prohibited firearm could keep it, and the whole ban would expire in ten years if not renewed. Of course, it wasn’t renewed. However, it was still a major advancement in gun control that shocked many Americans out of their comfort zones of grudgingly accepting more and more restrictions slowly over time. A bird’s-eye view of gun control in America shows the true nature of this progressive march toward a disarmed citizenry.
The Bill of Rights was ratified in December 1791. The first successful federal gun control law, the National Firearms Act of 1934, came 143 years later. Even then, ownership of machine guns wasn’t banned entirely – just made expensive and therefore difficult. Another 34 years later, the Gun Control Act of 1968 established convicted felons as prohibited persons and created the federal firearm license (FFL), making it a crime for anyone unlicensed to be a gun dealer and ending things like mail-order firearms. Just 18 years later, in 1986, the NFA was updated so no new machine guns could be legally obtained or manufactured without a special form of FFL. Seven years later, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act was enacted.
So by the time the Assault Weapon Ban came in 1994, Americans had, over the previous 60 years, allowed anti-gun legislators to heavily regulate the firearm and ammunition manufacturing industry, criminalize the ownership of some types of weapons, and made it next to impossible for the average person to own certain others. As well this also created entire groups of people who couldn’t keep and bear arms (firearms, at least) entirely, and established a federal police agency to oversee all these laws and pursue anyone who dared to defy the new normal.
Are the Tables Turning?
In the last 30 years, very little additional gun control has passed at the federal level – but that certainly isn’t for lack of trying. Progressive activists hold marches and speeches regularly, left-wing legislators draft tighter restrictions and bans that simply don’t make it through Congress, and the president advocates for the disarmament of the American people – all for their own good, of course. But the last several years have seen at least a partial reversal of that trend, and it may be that Second Amendment advocates have the draconian decade of the Assault Weapons Ban to thank for that. While the left continues to attack the right to keep and bear arms, individual states have one after the other loosened restrictions and trended more toward open or concealed carry without a need for a permit – especially in 2022. As it stands today, more than half the nation has some form of “constitutional carry.” On the judicial side of things, the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in the Bruen case answered the question of “whether modern firearms regulations are consistent with the Second Amendment’s text and historical understanding” by requiring a stricter reading of the amendment and its historical application. It was a major win for gun rights advocates, and it saw the overturning of numerous laws – and, in cases like Morgan’s, the dropping of charges. So, it seems the Second Amendment is making a comeback after all. ~Dig Deeper into the Cases Mentioned in this Article!
Liberty Vault: New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen Liberty Vault: United States v. Rahimi
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