In a case out of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit decided on April 21, a three-judge panel concluded that “…machineguns are not protected by the Second Amendment as weapons in common use for lawful purposes…” aligning with similar rulings from other appellate courts.
The case, United States v. Alsenat, was taken on appeal out of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, in which a grand jury indicted Maxon Alsenat for knowingly possessing a machinegun conversion device, also known as a “switch,” which allows many striker-fired pistols to achieve fast rates of fire with a single press of a trigger.
The lower district court denied the plaintiff’s motion to dismiss, ruling that “machineguns are not in common use and are dangerous and unusual,” and that machinegun conversion devices possessed without a separate firearm are “accessories” or “accoutrements” and not “arms” protected by the Second Amendment.
In their de novo review of the case, the Eleventh Circuit looked at the Heller decision, which stated that the Second Amendment “does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.”
From that single reading, it concluded that machineguns can (virtually) only be used for criminal purposes, despite the fact that there are 234,718 machineguns lawfully possessed by Americans today that are transferable. The court wrote in its eight-page decision, “Unlike handguns, ‘the most popular weapon’ for ‘the core lawful purpose of self-defense,’ the ability of machineguns to fire automatically is best suited for criminal purposes…”
Although this aligns with other appellate decisions, it not only ignores the evolving technological landscape but also the reality that machineguns are, indeed, in common use for lawful purposes, according to the government’s own data.
