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Justice Stevens: Second Amendment is no obstacle to banning automatic weapons
Submitted by: Mark A. Taff
Website: http://www.marktaff.com

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[Miller] was generally understood to limiting the scope of the Second Amendment to the uses of arms that were related to military activities, Stevens said today during a question-and-answer session after a speech today with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violences Legal Action Project. The Court did not overrule Miller [in Heller]. Instead it read Miller to say only that the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns . . . Thus, the Second Amendment provides no obstacle to regulations permitting the ownership or the use of the sorts of the automatic weapons used in the tragic multiple killings in Virginia, Colorado, or Arizona in recent years.

Comment by: xqqme (10/16/2012)

Stevens has it wrong. The Miller decision found no evidence that the short barrelled shotgun was of use to the militia/military, none being presented because of the absence of Mr. Miller from the case by the time it reached SCOTUS.

"In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument."

Under the actual Miller standards, fully automatic, short-barrelled rifles should be legal to own, along with any other man-portable arms in regular military use.