Kansas judge dismisses machine gun case after SCOTUS gun rights ruling

Our opinions of the outcome of its application aside, this seems very clear to me: either there were bans on categories of weapons at the time of the founding, or there wasn’t.

Further, the existing ban on machineguns is on very shaky ground even without the recent jurisprudence.

A brief history: the National Firearms Act was passed in 1934, placing a $200 tax on the transfer of automatic firearms, suppressors, and disguised firearms. (edit: a $5 tax on “any other weapons”, which were intended to include disguised firearms) Initial drafts of the law also included handguns, but those were removed to help its passage. Because handguns were originally included, short-barreled rifles and shotguns were as well; when handguns were removed from the bill the others were not.

The NFA was not a ban at all - it was a tax intended to make it prohibitively expensive for everyday citizens to be able to afford those weapons. It was therefore seen to be justified under Congress’s taxation authority.

In 1968, the Gun Control Act prohibited the import of newly-manufactured automatics.

In 1986, an amendment of the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act was added (the “Hughes Amendment”) that prohibited the registration of any new automatic weapon. This was justified through the “power of the purse” - Congress explicitly withheld funding for the addition of new machineguns to the registry.

At that point, there is a contradiction - how can the NFA be justified through taxation authority after the law was amended to make it impossible to collect that tax?

In fact, that Marihuana Stamp Act of 1937 was modeled on the NFA, and by the late 1960s was widely considered likely to be overturned on the basis that it was not, in effect, a revenue generation measure. This lead to the passage of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, which repealed and replaced it.