A new petition filed with the Supreme Court on Friday asks the justices to find a nearly 100-year-old firearm regulation unconstitutional.
Under the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA), rifles with a barrel shorter than 16 inches face tax and registration requirements that can cost violators up to 10 years in prison or a fine of up to $250,00.
“Jamond Rush has been convicted of a felony and sentenced to 30 months’ imprisonment for possessing a firearm that is in common use for lawful purposes,” the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action’s (NRA-ILA) petition states. “The Seventh Circuit upheld that conviction while continuing to flout this Court’s Second Amendment precedents.”
Rush was charged for possessing an unregistered Anderson Manufacturing AR-15 rifle with a 7.5-inch barrel in 2022, according to court records.
Short-barreled rifles were regulated as a distinct class of firearms “for the first time in the twentieth century” as part of the NFA, which was intended to “address Prohibition-era violence committed by organized crime ‘gangsters,’” the NRA’s petition explains.
“Lower courts are unsure how to adjudicate challenges to restrictions on specific categories of arms and have thus adopted a variety of different—often conflicting—approaches, many of which are inconsistent with this Court’s precedents,” the petition states. “This confusion is most pronounced in the Seventh Circuit, which has issued opinions inconsistent not only with this Court’s precedents and decisions in other Circuits but also with its own precedents.”
NRA Executive Vice President and CEO Doug Hamlin said in a statement that the NFA “imposes burdens on law-abiding gun owners that have no grounding in the text, history, or tradition of the Second Amendment.”
“The Second Amendment guarantees the right of Americans to own commonly used firearms—including short-barreled rifles—without government interference, and we’re hopeful that the Supreme Court will use this opportunity to reaffirm that right,”
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