The foregoing citation to the Miller case is a contemptible lie, nothing less. In Miller, the US Supreme Court upheld Congress' regulation [under the NFA of 1934] of sawed off shotguns on the narrowest possible grounds, stating that,
"In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument."
The first words of the foregoing paragraph refer to the fact that the defendant[s] neither appeared nor filed a brief on appeal to the Court, so the Court had before it only the government's brief and the record below. Moreover, nothing in Miller supports the proposition for which it was cited by the Minnesota supreme court in the Atkinson case. The Supreme Court went off solely on its laboured and erroneous finding that sawed off shotguns were not militia weapons, and that hence they were subject to regulation under the NFA. For a detailed analysis of the Court's reasoning in Miller, the better to understand the Minnesota supreme court's mendacity and deep contempt for the 2nd Amendment, check the following: http://www.jpfo.org/miller.htm
The Court didn't even do that. The bottom line on the decision was that the case was remanded to trial court for further precedings. Rather that pursue the case against Miller's co-defendant Layton (Miller himself was dead) the government decided to offer a plea-bargain for time served.