The courts have already signaled their limits—so if the right to keep and bear arms is going to expand, it won’t come from judges. It will come from strategy, organization, and political will.
I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that the United States Supreme Court is not going to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear machine guns. The justices made this clear in Garland v. Cargil (2024).
In the District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) oral argument, the attorney representing the District of Columbia correctly argued that machine guns are arms protected by the Second Amendment. It was Justice Scalia who pushed back. In the view of the late justice, only arms that are in “common use” are arms protected by the Second Amendment.
The good news is that there is a strategy to bypass the 1986 de facto Federal ban on civilians acquiring machine guns, which would result in their becoming “in common use.”1
But we won’t be able to rely on the courts. We will have to come up with a political solution that will withstand the inevitable legal challenges.
By Charles Nichols
