Gun Owners defends machine guns in court brief
Written by
Greg Groening Published: 06 January 2016
Gun Owners defends machine guns in court brief
Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, says the argument is that machine guns are different from other firearms and therefore not protected by the Second Amendment.
“And our argument is, Look, these restrictions that we’ve suffered for so many years on machine guns violate the constitution,” Pratt tells OneNewsNow.
Gun Owners defends machine guns in court brief
A gun rights organization has gotten in a court case involving machine guns and their legality.
Gun Owners of America has filed an amicus brief in the case U.S. v. Watson that’s pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
At issue is the constitutionality of a portion of the 1986 McClure-Volkmer legislation, which prohibits the manufacture and possession of machine guns by Americans unless they were registered prior to the date of the act.
The legal case involves a family trust that had applied to manufacture an M16 and challenged the ATF’s eventual denial of that application.
Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, says the argument is that machine guns are different from other firearms and therefore not protected by the Second Amendment.
“And our argument is, Look, these restrictions that we’ve suffered for so many years on machine guns violate the constitution,” Pratt tells OneNewsNow.
He says machine guns have been so regulated that they’re practically banned.
Some in the public and in media consider so-called “assault weapons” such as AR-15s to be “machine guns,” though they are in fact semi-auto rifles.
A “machine gun” is a firearm that continually fires with a single pull of the trigger or, more typically, a firearm that includes select firing for semi-automatic or fully automatic.
A fully automatic firearm is a “Class 3” weapon that are heavily regulated by the ATF and cost thousands of dollars.
Pratt, Larry (GOA)On its website, GOA says its legal brief argues the M16 is the “lineal descendent” of blackpowder muskets that would have been familiar to the Founding Fathers when they wrote the U.S. Constitution.
“Far from being ‘dangerous and unusual,’ GOA writes, “it is simply the most recent development in a long chain of firearms evolution.”
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