A U.S. judge has dismissed charges against a woman who possessed a machine gun, citing a U.S. Supreme Court decision that shifted the framework for how courts analyze cases dealing with constitutional rights.
Machine guns fall under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, U.S. District Judge John Broomes found.
That means prosecutors must show that the law barring possession of machine guns is rooted in historical firearm restrictions, under the 2022 Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, he added.
“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,” Broomes wrote in his 10-page ruling on Aug. 21. “Indeed, the government has barely tried to meet that burden. And the Supreme Court has indicated that the Bruen analysis is not merely a suggestion.”
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority in Bruen, said that when the Second Amendment is found to apply, government officials must show that the regulation in question “is consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
In the recent ruling in United States v. Rahimi, the justices found that a law prohibiting people under domestic violence-related restraining orders from possessing guns does not violate the Second Amendment, and they clarified how courts should analyze such regulations.
“A court must ascertain whether the new law is ’relevantly similar‘ to laws that our tradition is understood to permit, ’apply[ing] faithfully the balance struck by the founding generation to modern circumstances,'” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. He said that some courts had misunderstood Bruen.
Broomes’s decision came after prosecutors charged Tamori Morgan, a Kansas resident, with illegally possessing an Anderson Manufacturing AM-15 .300 caliber machine gun and a machine gun conversation device.
Morgan’s lawyer argued that the charges should be dismissed because the law that she allegedly violated unconstitutionally strips people of their right to possess machine guns. He noted that the history of machine gun prohibition is limited, with Congress not enacting the ban until 1968.
Government lawyers argued that machine guns are not covered by the Second Amendment and, even if they are, banning their possession is consistent with English common law and a North Carolina law that banned dangerous and unusual firearms.
Broomes sided with the defendant, noting that hundreds of thousands of machine guns are legally possessed because the 1986 law included a grandfather clause.
“Even today, it is perfectly legal for a person who has not been divested of his firearm rights under some other provision of law to acquire and possess a machinegun, so long as it was lawfully possessed by someone before the relevant date in 1986, and so long as he complies with the National Firearms Act’s requirements to obtain and possess the weapon. In that sense, machineguns are not unusual,” he wrote.
The judge cautioned that the ruling applies only to Morgan and that the government could later demonstrate that the machine gun ban is rooted in the nation’s history.
“Importantly, this decision says little about what the government might prove in some future case,” Broomes said. “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 § 922(o).”
