On Wednesday, a Trump judge in Kansas ruled that the Second Amendment invalidates criminal charges against a defendant accused of illegally possessing a machine gun. The case is United States v. Morgan.
Judge John Brooms ruled Morgan Plainly wrong, even under the Supreme Court’s most aggressively pro-gun opinions, on which Brooms relied heavily.
Supreme Court judgment in 2022 New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) cast a cloud of uncertainty over nearly all US gun laws, requiring government lawyers to prove that any gun law challenged in court is consistent with “this nation’s historic tradition of gun control.” Judges across the country have struggled to interpret and apply that vague standard, and many of them have publicly complained that the bridge Their published opinions are invalid.
read separately, of Bruin The vague “historical tradition” test may be read to support Brooms’ conclusion. but the bridge A previous legal rule was left in place, first announced District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which allows the government to ban “dangerous and unusual weapons”. Heller There is also a line saying it would be “shocking” to conclude that one of the Court’s earliest Second Amendment decisions struck down a federal ban on machine guns.
get closer HellerConcluding that the government could regulate weapons as dangerous and unusual as fully automatic firearms, Brooms initially argued that there were no laws similar to the modern-day ban on machine guns in 18th-century England or America’s founding period.
Of course, there’s a really obvious reason why no actual machine gun ban existed in the 1700s: the machine gun wasn’t invented until 1884.
Brooms also argues that centuries-old English and early American laws prohibited the carrying of guns only “to frighten the subjects of the king” or “in a manner which would naturally cause a terror to the people.” And so, the Trump judge suggested, charging someone with illegally carrying a weapon is unconstitutional unless Defendant also “Takes the same weapon out on the public streets and displays it in an offensive manner.”
Taken seriously, this argument would prohibit a government from banning the possession of a tank, a fighter jet, or even a nuclear warhead, so long as a civilian possessing a nuclear warhead does not publicly advertise it.
In any case, Brooms’ decision will be appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, a left-leaning court where Democratic appointees outnumber Republicans by 7-5 among the court’s active justices. So the appeals court will almost certainly overturn Brooms and reinstate the rule that dangerous and unusual weapons can be banned.
of the Brooms United States v. Morgan Why is the decision a monument? the bridge must be cancelled
“Historical tradition” test is announced the bridge It has no factual substance, cannot be applied consistently by lower court judges and has led to absurd and unethical results. Last June, for example, the Supreme Court had to intervene after an appeals court, on a perfectly honest plea. the bridge The decision states that victims of domestic violence have a constitutional right to own guns.
But in the court’s judgment in that case United States v. RahimiOverturned one of the most surprising posts in the federal judiciary—the bridge Decision, leave it bridge’Misleading historical tests in place. under Rahimi“A court must ascertain whether the new law is ‘substantially similar’ to the laws that our tradition allows”—whatever that means.
In a separate concurring opinion RahimiJustice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited a dozen lower court opinions that charged that judges did not understand how the bridge to work As one of those opinions stated, “Courts act in good faith Struggle at every stage the bridge investigation. These struggles revolve around numerous, often perverse, difficult questions.”
This chaos is likely to continue till the bridge The history and tradition test announced in the overturned case provides no meaningful guidance to lower court judges on whether gun laws are constitutional. And the bridge Allows judges who are determined to reach pro-gun decisions, virtually regardless of the consequences of repealing any gun laws — which may explain the Brooms decision. Morgan case
