Massachusetts law currently prohibits ownership of “assault weapons,”
the statutory definition of which includes the most popular
semi-automatic rifles in the country, as well as “copies or duplicates”
of any such weapons. As for what that means, your guess is as good as
ours. A group of plaintiffs, including two firearm dealers and the Gun
Owners’ Action League, challenged the law as an unconstitutional
violation of their Second Amendment rights. Unfortunately, both a
federal trial judge and appellate court upheld the ban—though they could
not agree on why. The trial judge followed the lead of the Maryland case of
Kolbe v. Hogan (in which Cato filed
a brief supporting a petition to the Supreme Court), misconstruing from a shred of the landmark 2008 Supreme Court opinion in
District of Columbia v. Heller
that the test for whether a class of weapons could be banned was
whether it was “like an M-16.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the First Circuit (in which Cato also
filed a brief),
conjured up a complex interest-balancing test that boiled down to a
much simpler question: is it like a handgun? If not, the weapon is not
sufficiently “well-suited” to self-defense in the home and can be
banned. Both tests contravene the core holding of
Heller that
all weapons in common civilian use are constitutionally protected. The plaintiffs are now asking the Supreme Court to hear their case.
Cato, joined by several organizations interested in the protection of
our civil liberties, has filed
an amicus brief
supporting the plaintiffs’ petition. We discuss how the federal circuit
courts have, absent further guidance from the Supreme Court, stumbled
around in the dark in their attempts to apply
Heller’s “common use” test.
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