What Happened:
Justin Bryce Brown was charged with owning a machine gun under 18 U.S.C. § 922(o)—a law that bans the possession of machine guns made after 1986.
The judge ruled that the government failed to prove that banning machine guns aligns with historical firearm restrictions, a key test under the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision.
The "dangerous and unusual" argument fell apart when the court found that 740,000 legally owned machine guns exist in the U.S. today. If nearly a million people own something, can it really be called "unusual"?
What This Means:
This ruling only applies to this case for now, but if it gets appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, things could get very interesting.
The Fifth Circuit previously upheld the machine gun ban in Hollis v. Lynch (2016), but back then, there were only 175,000 legally owned machine guns. Now, that number is 740,000—a fourfold increase. That could change everything.
If the Fifth Circuit agrees with this ruling, it could put major pressure on the Supreme Court to revisit the federal machine gun ban.
The Big Question:
Are machine guns really "unusual" if nearly a million of them are legally owned? And if they’re not, does the government have the authority to ban them at all?
What do you think? Is this the beginning of the end for the federal machine gun ban? Or is the Fifth Circuit about to drop a massive plot twist? ...
