In a ruling that certainly sent shivers through the anti-gun community, a federal judge in Kansas threw out the case against a resident charged with illegally possessing a machine gun.
U.S. District Judge John Broomes determined in U.S. v. Morgan that 2022’s Supreme Court Bruen decision rendered the federal law against possessing and transferring fully automatic weapons unconstitutional. The high court case established that gun control statutes must be aligned with the nation’s history and tradition of firearms regulations.
According to Broomes, the federal prohibition of machine guns did not reach that mark.
He noted that Washington’s attorneys were unable to establish the existence of bans on these weapons in the nation’s history.
Simple possession was the charge faced by Tamori Morgan, who was indicted in 2023 for owning a model AM-15 .300 caliber machine gun and a conversion device commonly known as a “Glock switch.”
The government presented the court with two historic examples to buttress its case. The first was English common law, which was asserted to prevent traveling with “dangerous or unusual weapons.”
The second sprang from the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1924. In that case, the court determined that laws against being armed “with dangerous and unusual weapons, in such a manner as will naturally cause a terror to the people” are constitutional.
Broome heard evidence from both examples but rejected the government’s position. The court ruled that merely possessing a machine gun is not a violation of federal law under the Bruen precedent.
Broome determined that the previous laws concerned the transportation or use of these firearms, not simply their possession.
The judge wrote, “If an individual purchases such a weapon and locks it away in a gun safe in his basement for 20 years without touching it, he is just as guilty of a violation…as one who takes the same weapon out on the public streets and displays it in an aggressive manner.”
Broome added that machine guns are “bearable arms” in alignment with the intent of the Second Amendment.
No federal appeal was immediately filed, though it is inevitable that there will be one.
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