This Court Case Could Blow a Grand Canyon-Sized Hole Through Federal Gun Laws

Does the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms apply to fully automatic machine guns? The US District Court for the Western District of Tennessee is poised to rule on the matter.

Jaquan Bridges pleaded guilty to possessing a machine gun after engaging in a 2023 shootout with police officers on a Tennessee highway. Courthouse News reported that Bridges “was arrested with a Glock .40 caliber pistol with an attachment that converted the handgun into a machine gun, but fought to dismiss the charge on constitutional grounds.”

He claimed the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen required dismissal of the charge because machine guns fall under the definition of "arms" used in the Second Amendment.

U.S. District Judge John Fowlkes Jr. disagreed, and cited the 2008 Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller in his decision to deny the dismissal motion.

"Heller explained that the type of weapons protected by the Second Amendment 'were those 'in common use at the time' and we think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of 'dangerous and unusual weapons,''" he said.

Attorney Greg Gookin, a federal public defender assigned to Bridges' case, argued Wednesday his client had no criminal history or prior convictions that precluded him from owning and possessing a firearm at the time of his arrest.

Gookin urged the panel to conduct a historical analysis required under the Bruen ruling, and told the court there are no "historical analogues" to machine guns.

"But it's not whether there is an analogue to a machine gun, it's only whether there is an analogue to a ban on entire weapon types," U.S. Circuit Judge John Nalbandian said.

"The test is: Are they dangerous and unusual?" the attorney responded. "With the proliferation of these weapons, I don't think the government can meet that standard."

Assistant US Attorney Eileen Kuo brought up a court’s ruling in the 2009 Hamblen v. United States, where the court used the Heller decision to determine that the Second Amendment did not protect a Tennessee State Guard member who owned several machine guns.

However, Judge John Nalbandian noted that “Hamblen doesn’t apply after Bruen.”

When asked for a historical example supporting her contention that the Second Amendment does not cover machine guns, she responded, “The regulation on gunpowder in the 1800s regulated the amount of gunpowder an individual could own.”

The judge didn’t seem to buy this. He noted that regulation “was a fire code issue so they wouldn’t blow up the town.”

He asked, "Isn't the 1986 machine gun ban the first? That's fairly powerful evidence of no historical evidence of the federal government banning any category of weapons."

Kuo replied, insisting that current firearms, unlike those manufactured in the 19th century, are “highly destructive and specialized weapons” and claimed the Second Amendment “does not include the right to go on the offensive and to wage war with military weapons.”

This could be a pivotal case — especially if the court rules against the machine gun ban. It would constitute a significant victory for gun rights.

Judge Nalbandian is right, these laws do not pass the Bruen test, which requires all gun restrictions to have historical analogues — meaning that if a regulation does not have a similarity with other gun laws passed earlier in American history, it is deemed unconstitutional. Hopefully, the other judges on the panel will concur.

The Bruen standard says that if a class of firearms is not both dangerous AND unusual, it cannot be banned. If you go back to the Supreme Court decision in Caetano (2017?), it was ruled that the existence of some 200,000 stunguns nationally precluded them from being “unusual.“ Well, there are something like 175,000 full autos listed in the NFA registry, which does not include all of the “dealer samples“ that have been made since May 19, 1986. A very serious argument could be made that the Hughes amendment, codified as Title 42 Section 922(o), which forbid the treasury department from issuing any tax stamps for full autos manufactured after May 19, 1986, is the proximate cause of their not being significantly more than 200,000 full autos in the NFA registry. Simple math demonstrates this: if you just take an arithmetic average (which actually hurts our side, but let’s put that aside until later), 175,000 full autos registered over the 52 years between 1934 and 1986 equates to 3,365 full autos registered per year. If that same average held up from 1986 through 2023 (the year that the “crime” in this case occurred), there would have been 124,505 more full autos, for a total of almost exactly 300,000 - roughly 50% higher than the Caetano threshold for “unusual “ to apply.

As for why a simple arithmetic average hurts our side, there are a multitude of reasons why this is so. First, the population of the country was a lot lower on average from 1934 through 1986 van it was from 1986 through 2023. More people means more people wanting to purchase full auto firearms. Second, the first several years during which the NFA was in effect were in the middle of the great depression, and the next several years after that this country was in the middle of World War II. During the depression, many fewer people would have had the means with which two purchase any firearm, let alone a full auto one, and during World War II there were very few sales of firearms to civilians, because virtually 100% of the production Went to the military. That is most certainly the case with regard to full auto firearms. Third, the $200 tax stamp was a significantly higher barrier to entry in the earlier. Then it was since 1986. This is due to inflation. A fourth factor, which is more cultural than anything else is that there have been a whole lot more movies and TV shows, as well as video games featuring full auto firearms. The appearance of full auto firearms far more frequently in popular entertainment undoubtedly would have led to additional purchases over and above those that would naturally have occurred because of increases in population, changed economic circumstances, and increased purchasing power. Us, a case for many more Fallowes that would have been in Public hands in 2023 can certainly be made. There is simply no way that any court can, with a straight face, make a ruling that fall out of firearms are unusual and, as a result, they should be protected arms under the Second Amendment.

This guy should win his case… but I am not sure that it should go up to the Supreme Court just yet. I hope that if this guy wins, that the feds decide not to appeal it to the Supreme Court. We need to get a few more Second Amendment wins under our belts, most importantly, one on semi auto firearms, and we probably need to get rid of one of the three kooky liberal women on the Supreme Court and replace them with someone who actually respect the words of the constitution. That will be the time to bring such a case before the Supreme Court.

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