Judge Issues Shock Machine Gun Ruling

A federal judge recognized a 22-year-old Kansan’s Second Amendment right to own machine guns last week.

U.S. District Judge John Broomes’ ruling is the latest in a series of contradictory interpretations of gun rights stemming from the Supreme Court’s sweeping reinterpretation of the Second Amendment in the 2022 case of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.

That decision, penned by Justice Clarence Thomas, said laws restricting gun rights are only constitutional if they stem from a tradition of regulation dating from some time between the signing of the Bill of Rights in 1791 and the end of the Civil War.

The defendant in the Broomes case, Tamori Morgan, was charged by a federal grand jury last year with possession of a .30-caliber, fully automatic rifle, along with a Glock pistol affixed with a conversion device that allowed it to shoot automatically.

Federal law prohibits the possession of machine guns produced after 1986 and requires the registration and special taxation of civilian-owned machine guns produced before that year. Under federal law, possessing a machine gun conversion device is the same as possessing a machine gun — whether or not the device is attached to a gun. Violating the machine gun ban is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Broomes, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, found that the government failed to identify a historical analog that could be used to justify the blanket prohibition on machine gun possession that Congress passed in 1986.

Prosecutors noted that the landmark 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which extended Second Amendment rights to individuals rather than just militias, specifically did not aim to undermine longstanding