With its Cert Filing in Rush v. United States, NRA-ILA Targets the NFA’s Short-Barrel Rifle Regulation

The National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action has filed a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court in Rush v. United States. The case challenges the NFA’s unconstitutional restrictions on short-barreled rifles. This latest U.S. Supreme Court Filing comes on the heels of the denial of cert in both the Snope and Ocean State Tactical cases and the Court tossing Mexico’s lawfare attack on Smith & Wesson. 

The case revolves around Jamond M. Rush, who was charged with being in possession of an unregistered SBR. He has been convicted and sentenced to 30 months in prison “for possessing a firearm that is in common use for lawful purposes.” Rush has appealed, but got no relief at either at the federal district court level or at the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Both held that SBRs are not protected under the Second Amendment. As the cert filing argues . . .

This Court has held and repeatedly reaffirmed that the Second Amendment’s plain text covers all bearable arms. 

The Seventh Circuit, however, has injected several limitations into the plain text—limitations that have resulted in the exclusion of semiautomatic rifles owned in the tens of millions, ammunition magazines owned in the hundreds of millions, and, here, rifles with shorter-than average barrels, numbering over half a million. According to the Seventh Circuit’s holding below, an ordinary rifle with a 16-inch barrel is an arm, but the same rifle with a 15 7/8-inch barrel is not. Such a distinction at the plain text stage is arbitrary, illogical, and contrary to this Court’s precedents.

This Court has also held and repeatedly reaffirmed that the Second Amendment protects arms “‘in common use at the time.’” But the Seventh Circuit has expressly “rejected” such “commonality reasoning,” deriding this Court’s “common use” test as a “circular,” not “very helpful,” “slippery concept” that “would have anomalous consequences.”

The Seventh Circuit has manufactured its own test, which seemingly cannot be satisfied. In this case, the court paradoxically dismissed short-barreled rifles’ “popularity” and “prolif[eration]” as having “little jurisprudential value,” while simultaneously concluding that Rush failed to prove that they are “commonly used” for lawful purposes. 

The cert petition argues that “[t]he NFA’s registration and taxation requirements for short-barreled rifles” violate the Second Amendment. Citing Bruen’s approach that there must be an analogous law from the Founding, the brief states that “the plain text covers the possession of short-barreled rifles and no historical tradition supports registration and taxation requirements for arms in common use—such as short-barreled rifles—Section 5861(d) violates the Second Amendment.”

“The National Firearms Act imposes burdens on law-abiding gun owners that have no grounding in the text, history, or tradition of the Second Amendment,” said Doug Hamlin, NRA executive vice president and CEO. “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.”

NRA’s release states that the petition aims to clear up some of the confusion among lower courts on the handling of such topics. Besides SBRs, the NRA observes, the court needs to settle what prohibitions are allowed in similar hardware-related cases. 

“The NFA’s restrictions on short-barreled rifles have unconstitutionally burdened law-abiding gun owners for far too long,” said John Commerford, NRA-ILA executive director. “The NRA is proud to stand at the forefront of this fight to restore our freedoms and ensure that peaceable citizens are not treated like criminals for owning commonly used firearms.”

There’s been a lot of momentum in both litigation and legislation concerning the National Firearms Act. Rush v. United States is just the latest salvo in the long war being waged to deconstruct unconstitutional regulations that limit the rights and even imprison otherwise law-abiding citizens. Rush and those similarly situated, as the brief explains, deserve not to be subject to loss of liberty over malum prohibitum regulatory schemes which have no foundation in our nation’s history.