Update: The day after this story was originally published, the National Rifle Association provided comments in a blog post. More details have been added below.
Last month, a federal judge dismissed criminal charges against a Kansas man for illegal possession of machine guns, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial Bruen decision. Despite decades of precedent and rulings to the contrary, U.S. District Judge John W. Broomes, a President Trump appointee, held in United States v. Morgan that fully automatic machine guns are protected by the Second Amendment because they are “bearable arms.”
In his dismissal, Judge Broomes claimed that the federal government failed to identify a historical analog to the restrictions challenged in this case. But in the majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the mere suggestion that a law restricting machine guns “might be unconstitutional” was “startling.” He also explained that “dangerous and unusual” weapons are not protected by the Second Amendment, which meant that “weapons that are most useful in military service — M-16 rifles and the like — may be banned.” (To learn more about the U.S. military’s M16 machine guns and civilian AR-15s, click here.) And before United States v. Morgan, every other court that considered whether machine guns are protected by the Second Amendment held that they are not.
machine gun regulations
United States v. Morgan highlights the dramatic proliferation of devices that convert semi-automatic firearms, which fire one shot per trigger pull, into fully automatic machine guns that can continue firing as long as the shooter depresses the trigger and the gun has ammunition.
The defendant in the case was charged with illegally possessing an Anderson Manufacturing AR-15 converted into a fully automatic machine gun and a “Glock switch,” a device used to convert Glock-style pistols into machine guns.
According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), police recovered 814 machine gun conversion devices from 2012 to 2016, but that figure jumped to 5,454 from 2017 to 2021 — reflecting a 570-percent increase. To learn more about these machine gun conversion devices click here.
Machine guns have been heavily regulated for almost a century because of the danger they pose. The National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934 imposed strict registration requirements on machine guns, or “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger,” as well as the parts used to create them.
The Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986 went a step further by prohibiting civilians from owning machine guns manufactured after May 19, 1986 — like the AR-15 and “Glock switch” central to United States v. Morgan — with a provision known as the Hughes Amendment.
divide among gun groups?
The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s trade association — which applauded the Bruen decision and called it a “tremendous victory” — has not yet made any public statements regarding Judge Broomes’ ruling.
For its part, the National Rifle Association, which celebrated the Bruen decision as a “win for constitutional freedom and the NRA,” downplayed the effects of the ruling in a blog post, writing, “The immediate outcome was the dismissal of the charges against Morgan without invalidating the federal machinegun law, meaning that for everyone else, machineguns are still illegal to possess outside of the limited circumstances permitted by federal law.” According to the NRA, the ruling was not “opening the door to mayhem and carnage in the streets.”
It’s unclear if the NRA and NSSF support civilians owning machine guns — unlike smaller, more extreme gun groups that have made their positions on the issue more evident. For example, Gun Owners of America and the National Association for Gun Rights praised Judge Broomes’ ruling, and both groups have called for the repeal of the NFA and fought machine gun restrictions in court. The latter organization recently tweeted, “Anyways abolish the Hughes Amendment. Better yet throw the entire NFA in the trash.”