Miller was back in the 30s, right? I remember the decision being embarrassing for overlooking the fact that shotguns were used in WWI. Not that the 2nd amendment is restricted to weapons generally issued by the army and kept under lock and key down at your local national guard headquarters, or whatever the argument is. It’s just that, per usual, they were wrong according to their own rules.
Not that judges have shame.
Since Miller was dead, there was no follow up when the case was sent back to the lower court. That was our “landmark” case, very much mischaractorized by the gun grabbers, until Heller. Gray area remains.
US v. Miller was in 1939.
The court of original jurisdiction dismissed the case against Layton and Miller on Second Amendment grounds.
The government appealed directly to the Supreme Court which accepted the case.
The Supreme Court was asked by the government to rule that the defendants were not protected by the Second Amendment because they were not members of the Militia.
By failing to respond to this argument, the Supreme Court rejected it. Had it been necessary that Miller was a member of a Militia in order to be protected then no further findings would be necessary.
Instead, the Supreme Court considered the argument by the government that the weapon in question was not suitable for use by a Militia and therefor the Second Amendment didn't protect Miller's use of such a weapon.
The Supreme Court agreed with this argument, but pointed out that it had no information on the record to determine whether the short-barreled shotgun is useful to a Militia. The record was empty because the lower trial court had not found it necessary to examine the issue; no doubt, because the Second Amendment does not say that only some arms are protected.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government's appeal of the lower court dismissal and remanded the case back to that court for further findings regarding the nature of the weapon. (Typically, the Supreme Court is a court of appeals and deals with matters of law, using lower court proceedings for determining matters of fact.)
Before any trial was held, one of the defendants took a plea bargain and the other died, so no trial was ever held.
By refusing to take on any other Second Amendment cases, that Supreme Court, and later Supreme Courts, let stand rulings by the various Circuit Courts of Appeal that completely mis-stated the ruling in Miller as one which established that the Second Amendment is a "collective right", which is legal nonsense. This resulted in many courts denying standing to sue the government in Second Amendment cases because nobody qualified as "a Militia".
With the recent Heller decision, the charade has ended and the Second Amendment is recognized as an individual right, the right includes the right to use arms in self-defense, and the later McDonald decision bars infringement of the right by states and municipalities.
Miller isn’t much good as a precedent for anything. Miller was dead at the time, and didn’t argue the case. No defense at the supreme court was presented.
The embarrassment is that the federal government prosecuted a case against a dead man. The court recognized that, (duh!) and stated that ‘in the absence of judicial notice....’ meaning that they knew it was true despite being absent from the government’s case.