Article 1 Section 8 of the US Constitution outlines the missions of the militia. “[T]he Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” The Second Amendment describes the militia as “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.” Given that our employees use automatic weapons to perform missions like those described in Article 1 Section 8, we, the people (who make up the militia) have the “right to keep and bear” the same “Arms” as they do. The NFA passed in 1934 could not get around this and had to rely on the taxing power of the Constitution keep the people from buying the same weapons as their employees use. Personally the NFA infringes on the 2nd is my position, and is unconstitutional. Mao the murderer, was correct when said “political power grows from the barrel of a gun.”
“ The NFA passed in 1934 could not get around this and had to rely on the taxing power of the Constitution keep the people from buying the same weapons as their employees use.”
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And, not so coincidentally, the Hughes Amendment to the 1986 FOPA (Section 922(o)) prevents the collection of that tax for any full auto made after May 18,1986. So it is no longer a taxing statute, it is a ban. My point of view is that either the Hughes amendment must be overturned, allowing us to purchase newly manufactured full autos if we pay the $200 tax, or the entire NFA as it relates to full autos is unconstitutional. I, of course, prefer the latter, but I will settle for the former.
I also find it interesting that there are right now approximately 175,000 full autos in civilian hands that are on the NFA list. That number is very important, because the 2008 Heller decision indicated that the only classes of arms that could be banned were those that were BOTH dangerous AND not in common use. Fast-forward to 2016 and the Caetano decision, which had to do with Massachusetts trying to ban stun guns. The Supreme Court in that decision indicated that since there were (at that time) about 200,000 stun guns in public hands across the country, they were considered to be in common use. 175,000 autos falls a bit short of that 200,000 threshold, however, it should also be noted that the reason there aren’t more full autos in civilian hands is because of the NFA itself, and because of the Hughes Amendment. The government, if a case on this issue ever wind its way through the federal courts, can hardly argue that these weapons are not in common use when the very statutes that would be at issue in such a case would be the cause of their being far less of these devices than would otherwise be the case.
As for these crying women and girly men in LA moaning about the striking down of the bump stock ban, they clearly do not understand how the separation of powers in our Constitution works. Either that, or they simply don’t like it because they didn’t get the result that they want (IOW, they are fascists). This was not struck down on second amendment grounds, it was struck down because an executive branch agency took upon itself the power to change the law, something that only the legislative branch is capable of doing under our Constitution. The judicial branch, which appointed itself the sole arbiter of constitutionality of any laws (in Marbury v. Madison), correctly decided that the BATF(uckers) had overstepped the constitutional bounds of the Executive Branch, and struck down the offending regulation. By the way, I believe that Justice Alito was baiting the Congress. I don’t think he really and truly wants a bump stock ban to be passed and be enforceable. I believe that he wants this case decided upon second amendment grounds. Reference the paragraph above: surely, at this point in time, there are more than 200,000 bump stocks in public hands. By the time the Congress gets around to passing any such legislation (IF they do), there will be many tens or hundreds of thousands more. Congress can scream all it wants about how dangerous they are (which is pure nonsense), but they would clearly be in common use and not constitutionally capable of being banned. I believe that this is the result that Alito wants. It would be an open and shut case. As an alternative, perhaps what Alito wants is Congress on record as stating that bump stocks are included in the definition of “machine guns.“ If that is the case, we would then have a situation where you have 175,000 machine guns already on the NFA list, Edit to which will be the much larger numbers of “machine gun” bump stocks, and you are again in a position where there are more than enough “machine guns“ for them to be considered to be “in common use.“ The NFA, as applied to machine guns suddenly becomes unconstitutional. Alito is playing 3-D chess.