Third Circuit Upholds Machine Gun Ban and Leaves Suppressor Registration Fight Wide Open

A new Third Circuit ruling should have every gun owner paying attention, even if machine guns are not part of your world. The bigger issue is how courts treat the Second Amendment when registration schemes get waved off as no big deal.

In United States v. Berger, the court upheld Joseph Paul Berger’s convictions for possessing machine guns and unregistered suppressors. The panel acknowledged that machine guns fall under the Second Amendment’s plain text, then still upheld the federal ban by saying they are not suited for lawful civilian use.

The suppressor side may reach even farther. A two-judge majority held that registration requirements considered “minimal” do not infringe the Second Amendment at all. That kind of reasoning matters because it gives government lawyers a path to argue that a registration burden is too small to trigger the historical test required under Bruen.

The case came after federal agents intercepted a package with three suppressors shipped from China to Berger’s home, then found more than five dozen firearms, including 13 fully automatic firearms and about 12 suppressors. Berger pleaded guilty to possessing a machine gun and an unregistered suppressor, while preserving his constitutional challenges on appeal.

You do not have to defend every fact pattern in a case to understand the danger in bad legal reasoning. Hunters, shooters and regular gun owners should care any time a court says a covered arm is protected in theory, then lets the government regulate around that protection in practice.