"Assault Rifle Confiscation" Can It Happen?

I have to agree with Joe American a person like me. Yes, there would be about 40 million “instant felons”. I don’t expect more than 20% of those formerly, law abiding citizens would immediately (if ever) surrender their valuable property to avoid prison time. Someone or some will be arrested, tried, convicted, and file an appeal. That appeal will go to the Supreme Court. Most likely, some will even resist to the point that they are killed in their attempt to resist arrest.

Since the Supreme Court has already established what constitutes a protected arm, by ruling that a sawed off shotgun did not have “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia” (US v Miller, 1939 ), weapons which do meet that criterion, must be protected under the Second Amendment. It will be very difficult for them to say that “assault weapons”, which by their very definition meet that criterion, are not protected under the Second Amendment. That, in essence, would permit government to ban any firearm. The law will be struck down, as well as all State prohibitions of “assault weapons”. Any other decision would be a signal that no rights are protected by the Constitution.

In the meantime, all of those citizens sitting in prison, perhaps for years, because they violated a worthless, unconstitutional law will regain their freedom, but they will never recover the cost of their attorneys, or the lost income from their years in prison. It would go down in history, infamous, as one of the greatest injustices ever perpetrated by the US government, worse than the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.

Edit: Since I wrote this piece, the simpler test to evaluate the protected status of firearms has advanced. The more recent, Heller definition of “arms in common use for lawful purposes”.

The Miller definition remains as a second line of defense.