There are watershed moments, though, that really do change the direction of laws. For example, these machine gun laws were the result of too much gang violence with machine guns. After the Vegas shooting, a Republican president passed the bump-stock ban. After a school shooting in Scotland, England essentially banned guns.
Movies show gun fights in the US all day long with machine guns, but the reality is that it doesn’t ever happen, or almost never. If criminals really started using machine guns regularly in crimes, it’s certainly possible that you would see more gun control laws start to come on, and, depending on the state of SCOTUS, they could stick.
To answer the OP: right now all that’s happened is that a single conviction in one jurisdiction has been tossed out due to one judge’s ruling. The wider consequence is that this is going to be appealed and counter-appealed and counter-counter-appealed probably all the way to the Supreme Court. This will take years, and who knows what the ideological leanings of a majority of the Court will be by that time?
@Cheesesteak your observation that we have a Second Amendment that for decades was tacitly ignored is spot-on; see “The Embarrassing Second Amendment” by Sandford Levinson. I’ll differ from you on which side of the “respect the 2nd or abolish it” debate I think we should fall on but at least the issue should be faced honestly. The Hughes amendment to the 1986 Firearms Owners Protection Act is not facing the issue honestly. By the sophistry of requiring licenses and then simply refusing to issue them, it turned what was supposed to be a regulatory act into a de facto ban.
The problem is that one person’s “watershed moment” is another person’s “moral panic”. In the early 1930s fear of “gangsters” was that era’s equivalent of fear of terrorists. It’s noteworthy that the 1934 National Firearms Act regulated exactly those items that had been luridly played up by Hollywood: The Tommy gun (even though the vast majority of gangland killings were done with pistols and shotguns), the misnamed “silencer” (which contrary to Hollywood don’t work on revolvers and don’t make guns whisper-quiet), and the short-barreled shotgun or rifle, hidden under his coat by a bandit.
If the Vegas shooting wasn’t this watershed moment, I don’t think full auto shootings would be. Like I said above, a full auto gun isn’t deadlier or going to accomplish significantly more carnage than a semi auto. Hence 500 people shot by semi auto guns in Vegas.
So all the accelerationist argument would do is make things worse.
Because the 1934 NFA didn’t ban them; it put an extraordinarily stiff by Great Depression standards tax on them and enacted stringent registration requirements. It was left to the states to actually ban them, and pre-McDonald the Second Amendment wasn’t incorporated to the states.
Sorry but the federal law establishing the National Guard, 10 U.S.C. § 246, would seem to contradict that interpretation. The National Guard is explicitly not under the limitations that militia were traditionally under in the 18th and 19th centuries. Specifically, the Guard is not limited in the duration of its service and it can be sent overseas.
BTW: I thought I’d note that the “machine gun” in question is this case was an auto-seer– a device attached to a semi-automatic handgun that causes it to do an uncontrolled magazine dump. It’s more of a gangsta’ hack than a real automatic firearm.
This seems unconstitutional to me, under current guidelines. And, isn’t there another law that says basically no new fully auto guns allowed? Maybe something with the FFL?
I think these examples show that our national debate on gun control isn’t being played on a level field.
The Supreme Court rules that a gun control law is unconstitutional because it lacks historical precedents. So gun control advocates present the historical precedents. And anti-gun control advocates say those historical precedents should have been unconstitutional so they don’t count.
Or we’re supposed to follow historical precedents. Like how states use to be able to regulate guns? No, the Supreme Court decides that states can’t regulate guns in 2010 - ignoring the historical precedents.
There’s no pattern of legal principles being applied in a consistent manner here. The pattern is judges picking and choosing when to apply legal principles in order to consistently produce the outcome of less gun control.
As I mentioned, the Hughs amendment is a sophistry, like calling a tax a “fee”; a ban that refuses to call itself a ban. More widely than Second Amendment questions, I wish all such abuses of what are supposed to be regulatory processes were held to be illegal.
It probably wouldn’t stand up constitutionally, if a case could actually make it all the way up to the SCOTUS. But even post-Heller, McDonald and Bruen the high court is notoriously reluctant to take on 2nd Amendment cases– to the point where I’ve characterized the Heller decision as “the court was backed into a corner”. S.O.P. is for the Court to refuse certiorari, bump appeals back to lower courts or rule as narrowly and technically as possible; in least in the case of the Second Amendment hardly the activism the Court is often accused of these days. In my more paranoid moments I wonder if successive Courts have been threatened by the CIA if they ever upheld a blanket endorsement of the Second Amendment.
My paragraph where I suggested a Hollywood shootout would let us get rid of the 2nd, was wishful thinking. It’s happened already multiple times, and only results in more guns being bought.
I do think if we had declared the first rounds of gun laws unconstitutional, the country at the time was more willing to adopt amendments, and we had a shot of repealing it and getting sensible laws in place.
K. Perhaps we are talking past each other now but,
Britain was one of the worlds premiere superpowers in 1776. Next to their Hessian Mercenaries they were considered the finest soldiers in the world. It’s a bit of a stretch to say contemporaries didn’t value Militia service. Particularly since even regular well drilled units must form around knowledgeable staff, and in times of peace in the Colonial Era that staff is working at the militia level. The United States Military Academy at West Point would be founded in 1802 to redress this.
Yes, we obviously are talking past each other because I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here.
Are you onboard with saying the British army and the Hessian mercenaries were professional soldiers and not militiamen? (Although it’s not really correct to call the Hessians mercenaries. They were regular soldiers serving various small German states and it was those governments and not the troops themselves that were paid to provide troops to British service.) And the officers who commanded them were full-time military professionals as well (although they were generally chosen due to class rather than due to merit).
I would question whether British and western German troops were considered to be the finest in the world. They were acknowledged as good troops but I don’t think they were seen as the best. Most people back then would have considered French, Austrian, Prussian, or Swedish troops to be the best.
no-, the 2nd ammendment specifically says that militias–plural with an S–are NOT “important”. They are illegal.
The amendment starts with the words: “A well-regulated militia being necessary”.
That’s A militia-- i.e. ONE single militia…not a whole bunch of militias.
And what’s more: that one, single militia must be “well-regulated”–which means that it is under the full control of one specific person, the commander-in-chief , giving orders from Washington.
Because of the technology of the 1770’s, (no industrial mass production) the only good way to arm such a militia was to allow its soldiers to bring their own muskets when they report for duty.
There was no intention of the founding fathers to create a lot of different militias. There was certainly no intention to allow militias which are not commanded by the President himself.
So let’s look at all those camo-wearing rednecks carrying AR rifles who surround statehouse buildings, or stand menacingly next to ballot drop-boxes, while NOT UNDER ANY CENTRALIZED COMMAND. They are doing exactly the opposite of what the founding fathers wrote in the words of the 2nd amendment.
Uh, that simply is not how the phrase “well-regulated” was used in the late Eighteenth century. Read “Concerning The Militia” aka The Federalist #29 in which Alexander Hamilton defines both the word militia and the phrase “well-regulated militia”.
I would further point out that as constructed from the original Latin, the word “militia” is properly a plural noun. Saying “a militia” or “militias” would have been an ungrammatical construction, like saying “a geese” or “geeses”.
It’s worth remembering that the constitution, having empowered the federal government to conduct foreign relations including declaring war and signing treaties of peace, explicitly forbids the states from having their own troops and ships of war, the means by which they might attempt to have their own independent foreign policies. Except as given permission to by the federal Congress, the states cannot have state armies. The purpose of militia then were to leave the states some residual armed force distinctly civilian and non-professional in character but collectively sufficient if necessary to stave off a federal dictatorship