United States v. Miller and Early Gun Laws

For most of American history, the Supreme Court said little about the Second Amendment. In United States v. Cruikshank in 1876 and Presser v. Illinois in 1886, it said the amendment restricted only the federal government. In the 1930s, gangland violence involving machine guns prompted Congress to pass the National Firearms Act of 1934, which taxed and required registration of weapons such as machine guns and short-barrelled shotguns.

Two men, Jack Miller and Frank Layton, were charged with transporting an unregistered short-barrelled shotgun across state lines. In United States v. Miller in 1939, the Court upheld the law, saying it had no evidence that such a shotgun had a reasonable relationship to a well-regulated militia. For decades, many lower courts read Miller as linking the right to militia service, while others read it more narrowly as a ruling about types of weapons. That ambiguity set up the major cases of the twenty-first century.