Category: All About Guns
The United States of America is founded on the presumption of innocence. After the Supreme Court’s landmark New York State Pistol Rifle Association v. Bruen Supreme Court decision, there is now a presumption that gun laws are unconstitutional unless the government can prove there was a similar law at the time of the ratification of the Second Amendment.
According to the Bruen decision, the interest balancing test does not apply to Second Amendment cases. The courts can only rely on the original text, history, and tradition of the Second Amendment.
This decision put most anti-gun politicians and advocates in a precarious position. Almost no gun control existed at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification. With the combination of little to no supporting historical evidence and without leniency from the previous interest balancing test, gun control advocates will have a much harder time of successfully passing legislation that will defeat SCOTUS’s new test. The anti-gun side had to find something in history that would save gun control laws.
Anti-gun state and gun control advocates usually point to the Sir John Knight’s Case that challenged the Statute of Northampton. According to the anti-gun side, the law forbids carrying a firearm in public. Still, most legal scholars agree that it banned the carrying of a gun in public only if the intent is to terrify the people. Without many other examples of gun control laws, the anti-gun side must base their arguments on this case.
Unfortunately for the gun control side, the Supreme Court addressed the Sir John Knight’s Case and others like it. According to Footnote 11 of the Bruen decision, whenever multiple interpretations can be taken from a case, the Supreme Court will favor the interpretation that favors the Second Amendment. This demand puts the burden on the state to prove their analog is consistent with the original text, history, and tradition of the Second Amendment.
Footnote 11 reads: “The dissent discounts Sir John Knight’s Case, 3 Mod. 117, 87 Eng. Rep. 75, because it only “arguably” supports the view that an evil-intent requirement attached to the Statute of Northampton by the late 1600s and early 1700s. See post, at 37. But again, because the Second Amendment’s bare text covers petitioners’ public carry, the respondents here shoulder the burden of demonstrating that New York’s proper-cause requirement is consistent with the Second Amendment’s text and historical scope. See supra, at 15. To the extent there are multiple plausible interpretations of Sir John Knight’s Case, we will favor the one that is more consistent with the Second Amendment’s command.”
Because SCOTUS referenced the case in a footnote doesn’t mean the state will not try to use Sir John Knight’s Case. We have seen states argue that they can use laws from the ratification date of the Fourteenth Amendment to defend their anti-gun statutes. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified shortly after the Civil War ended when states passed laws to prevent formerly enslaved people from getting firearms. Some courts might even accept these arguments, but it is delaying the inevitable.
SCOTUS laid down a straightforward test for gun laws. If a law is inconsistent with the plain text, history, and tradition of the Second Amendment, it must be thrown out. This new test puts the burden on the states to prove that their law is compatible with the Second Amendment.
About John Crump
John is a NRA instructor and a constitutional activist. John has written about firearms, interviewed people of all walks of life, and on the Constitution. John lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and sons and can be followed on Twitter at @crumpyss, or at www.crumpy.com.
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From the CCRKBA . . .
Democrats in the Washington State Legislature put politics ahead of constitutional rights Saturday when they voted 27-21 to approve House Bill 1240, which bans the future sale, manufacture and importation of so-called “assault weapons,” the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.
“Contrary to Democrats in Olympia, who sound like they’re reading from the same script, modern semiautomatic firearms are not ‘weapons of war’,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “This ban will not improve public safety, as proponents such as Attorney General Bob Ferguson have asserted. It will only impair the rights of law-abiding citizens, while doing absolutely nothing to prevent criminals from committing murder and mayhem, and they know it.”
The legislation, which goes back to the House for concurrence, does not ban possession of semiautomatic rifles, shotguns or handguns by people who already own them.
“One or more lawsuits challenging this legislation will almost certainly be filed within days, if not hours, of Gov. Jay Inslee’s signing,” Gottlieb predicted. “Ultimately, we expect this law to be nullified by the courts as a violation of the Second Amendment and Washington State’s constitution. In the meantime, of course, Evergreen State gun owners will continue to be treated like second-class citizens by the self-righteous zealots behind the ban, while the criminal element will remain undeterred and unencumbered.
“Proponents of this legislation have touted the results of a poll done last year by the Northwest Progressive Institute showing that 56 percent of Washington voters support a ban,” he continued. “What they overlook is that constitutional rights are not subject to popularity polls, a fact we expect the courts to remind them about in the days ahead.
“The truly sad part about this is that people who have been gulled into believing a gun ban will have any major impact on violent crime are going to find out the hard way they were misled by the gun prohibition lobby,” Gottlieb observed. “All this accomplishes is that it gives anti-gunners an excuse to celebrate at the expense of law-abiding Washington citizens who have committed no crime, and whose only sin is that they choose to exercise a constitutionally protected right. Where’s the justice, or even the logic, in that?”
The fight for Bakhmut in east Ukraine continues as Russian forces close in and Ukrainian soldiers repel them. In one fortified gun position, Bakhmut’s defenders are using a machine gun first invented almost 140 years ago. The Maxim gun, a belt fed machine gun, has become one of the reliable iconic weapons of the war.
“It only works when there is a massive attack going on…then it really works,” Borys, a soldier fighting for Ukraine, told the BBC. “So we use it every week”.
Ukraine has become a battlefield where advanced weaponry such as the IRIS-T air defense system and hypersonic missiles are being used for the first time. It’s a place where drones dominate the airspace and social media pages fill up with footage of every success and failure. But it’s also shown that older tactics and proven weapons can still be useful in a conflict as brutal and protracted as the war in Ukraine.
First invented in 1884, the Maxim Machine gun was the first fully automatic machine gun. The gatling gun predates it, but required someone to turn a crank to fire. The version of the Maxim that’s become popular in Ukraine is the M1910 model.
Maxims have been used in the Russo-Ukraine war nearly since the conflict began. Russia first invaded Ukraine with proxy forces in 2014 and the earliest footage of the weapon comes from a Ukrainian news network in 2016.
The M1910 Maxim was mass produced in Tsarist Russia. Its use has now outlived both the Tsar and Soviet communism. The antique weapon design is still popular because it’s easy to use, easily modified, and fires a standard 7.62x54mm cartridge that’s been used in Russia since 1891. It’s belt fed and water-cooled. A well-serviced Maxim can, theoretically, fire indefinitely without overheating so long as it’s fed both ammo and water.
That kind of reliability makes it a boon when a soldier is holding an entrenched position and fending off a heavy assault from infantry. That’s the position some of the Ukrainian defenders of Bakhmut currently find themselves in.
Soldiers in Ukraine are also heavily modifying the Maxim gun, making the 1910 model look and fire like a more modern weapon. The arms researcher Calibre Obscura surfaced a video of Ukrainian soldiers using a Maxim gun outfitted with modern optics, basic camouflage, a stock, and a suppressor. This is a weapon that typically sets in an entrenched position mounted on a heavy piece of steel. This modified version is a quieter, but not silent, burst fire weapon.
In another pair of videos pulled from TikTok, soldiers in Ukraine have attached four Maxim guns to a remote controlled rig that can spin 360 degrees. A video of a test fire showed a soldier aiming all four Maxim guns at once, each belt fed from ammunition canisters strapped to the rig.