A Kansas man named Tamori Morgan was facing charges for having a machine gun, but a judge has decided to drop those charges. The judge, John Broomes, said that the government didn’t do enough to prove that banning machine guns is allowed under the Constitution.
This decision is important because it might be the first time a court has said that banning machine guns could be unconstitutional. This came after a big Supreme Court decision in 2022 that gave people more gun rights. In that case, the Supreme Court said that any laws about guns need to be similar to old gun laws from the past in American history.
The judge in Kansas said that the government couldn’t find any old laws that were similar enough to the machine gun ban to make it okay. Because of this, the charges against Morgan were dropped.
Morgan was originally charged because he had a machine gun and a device called a “Glock switch” that can turn a regular gun into a machine gun. The government has strict rules about machine guns, making it illegal for most people to own them since 1986.
The laws about machine guns date back to 1934, when Congress first decided to limit them because criminals were using them a lot. In 1986, Congress completely banned civilians from owning new machine guns.
The judge said that the machine gun and Glock switch count as “arms” that people have the right to own under the Second Amendment, which protects the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. The government tried to argue that these weapons were too dangerous and unusual, but the judge didn’t agree with that reasoning.
A Glock switch is a small device that you can attach to a Glock handgun, turning it into a fully automatic weapon, meaning it can keep firing bullets as long as you hold down the trigger.
Because of this, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) considers the Glock switch to be a machine gun on its own, which makes it illegal to have.
If someone is caught with an unregistered machine gun, they could face a fine of up to $250,000 and up to 10 years in prison.
