NRA responds to Fourth Circuit ruling...

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The Court called the banned firearms – which include AR-15s and most magazine-fed semi-automatic rifles – “exceptionally lethal weapons of war.” It compared them to the M16, which the court claimed made them categorically unprotected by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Heller. The Court called the difference between a machine gun and a semi-automatic “slight”, despite the substantial differences in function and form, so much so that the federal law regulates each in highly dissimilar ways.

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And in doing so, the judges joining the majority opinion actually said that they do not consider themselves bound by the Supreme Court’s majority decision in Heller (to say nothing of their sworn oath to uphold the Constitution).

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Moreover, the majority opinion in Heller did not shrink from these facts. The opinion’s author, Justice Scalia, put it very plainly: “We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country, and we take seriously the concerns raised by the many amici who believe that prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution.” He continued: “But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.”

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Inapt analogies and interest-balancing, however, are exactly the techniques employed by the Kolbe majority. They counterfactually try to analogize AR-15s to M16s and other “weapons of war,” and then they insist such firearms can be subject to a ban because they’re dangerous. It’s likely that any ban of any type of firearm – and under any circumstances – would survive this shallow and self-serving rationale.

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If, as the Fourth Circuit suggests, a firearm loses Second Amendment protection because it is specifically designed for “killing or disabling the enemy,” then the whole idea of the Second Amendment protecting a defensive purpose (or applying to any well-designed firearm, for that matter) collapses. Handguns, rifles, and shotguns of any type can be equally “dangerous.”

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