The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has turned back a constitutional challenge to the federal ban on machine guns, ruling that the longstanding prohibition does not violate the Second Amendment. The decision lands in a legal environment already crackling with fights over firearm restrictions, bump stocks, and how far the government can go in regulating weapons that blur the line between semiautomatic and fully automatic fire.
The ruling, first reported by Courthouse News Service, keeps intact the federal prohibition on civilian possession of machine guns, a restriction that has been on the books for decades under the National Firearms Act and the Gun Control Act. The court found that the ban survives scrutiny even under the Supreme Court's reinvigorated historical-test framework from its 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
At the heart of the case was a question the Bruen decision forced every lower court in the country to confront: does a given firearms regulation have a historical analogue in the American tradition of gun regulation? The Eleventh Circuit concluded that the machine gun ban does.
Under Bruen, courts can no longer rely on a balancing test that weighs government interests against Second Amendment rights. Instead, they must ask whether the restriction is "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation." The Eleventh Circuit found that machine guns fall outside the scope of arms protected by the Second Amendment, or, at minimum, that historical precedent supports banning them.
For gun-rights advocates, the decision is a setback but not necessarily a surprise. Federal courts have consistently upheld the machine gun ban even as they have struck down other firearms restrictions in the post-Bruen landscape. A recent D.C. appeals court ruling struck down a magazine-capacity ban as unconstitutional, showing that courts are drawing lines between different categories of firearm restrictions rather than treating all gun regulations alike.
The Supreme Court's 2022 Bruen decision reshaped Second Amendment litigation overnight. Before Bruen, most federal courts used a two-step framework that included means-end scrutiny, essentially asking whether the government had a good enough reason for its restriction. Bruen threw that out. Now courts must look to history.
That shift has produced wildly different results depending on the restriction at issue. Some courts have struck down bans on carrying firearms outside the home. Others have upheld prohibitions on gun possession by convicted felons or domestic-violence restraining-order subjects. The machine gun ban sits at one end of the spectrum: it targets weapons capable of sustained automatic fire, and courts have generally found that such weapons were subject to regulation even in the founding era and the nineteenth century.
The Eleventh Circuit's reasoning follows that pattern. The court treated the ban as falling within a historical tradition of restricting weapons deemed especially dangerous and unusual, a category the Supreme Court itself has acknowledged in prior decisions including District of Columbia v. Heller.
While the Eleventh Circuit addressed machine guns directly, a closely related legal battle over bump stocks has reached the Supreme Court. Bump stocks are devices that allow a semiautomatic rifle to fire rapidly in a manner that mimics automatic fire. The Trump administration banned them in 2019 after the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, in which the gunman used rifles fitted with bump stocks and killed 58 people, with two more dying later.
The bump stock case, however, turns on a different legal question. It is primarily about statutory interpretation, not the Second Amendment. The central issue is whether federal law, as written in the 1930s, permits the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to classify bump stocks as machine guns without new legislation from Congress.
The Fifth Circuit ruled that it does not. AP News reported that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Biden administration's appeal of that ruling. Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote for the Fifth Circuit:
"The definition of 'machinegun' as set forth in the National Firearms Act and Gun Control Act does not apply to bump stocks."
Other circuits disagreed. Judge Robert Wilkins, writing for the D.C. Circuit, reached the opposite conclusion. He found that "under the best interpretation of the statute, a bump stock is a self-regulating mechanism that allows a shooter to shoot more than one shot through a single pull of the trigger. As such, it is a machine gun under the National Firearms Act and Gun Control Act."
That circuit split is what pushed the case to the Supreme Court. The justices heard oral arguments, and several conservative members of the bench expressed skepticism about the ATF's authority to impose the ban without explicit congressional action. The Washington Examiner reported that Justice Amy Coney Barrett acknowledged the practical argument while questioning the legal basis:
"Intuitively, I am entirely sympathetic to your argument. I mean, it seems like, yes, this is functioning like a machine gun would."
Justice Neil Gorsuch voiced a similar tension. "I can certainly understand why these items should be made illegal, but we're dealing with a statute that was enacted in the 1930s," he said. The implication was clear: if Congress wants bump stocks banned, Congress should say so plainly.
The Eleventh Circuit's machine gun ruling and the Supreme Court's bump stock review illustrate two distinct tracks in firearms law. One track involves the Second Amendment directly: does the Constitution protect a citizen's right to own a particular weapon? The other involves statutory authority: can a federal agency redefine what counts as a banned weapon without new legislation?
Conservative legal thinkers have staked out positions on both tracks. Many support broad Second Amendment protections while simultaneously insisting that executive agencies cannot stretch old statutes to cover new technologies without congressional approval. Those two principles do not conflict. A person can believe the machine gun ban is constitutional because Congress enacted it clearly and still believe the bump stock ban is unlawful because the ATF imposed it through regulatory reinterpretation.
The Supreme Court has been actively reshaping the boundaries of federal gun law. The Court agreed to hear a case on whether the federal government can bar marijuana users from owning firearms, another test of how far categorical gun bans can extend under the Second Amendment.
That case sits alongside other pending challenges. The Court is also reviewing whether habitual drug users can be barred from gun ownership, a question that forces the justices to define who qualifies as part of "the people" protected by the Second Amendment.
The federal machine gun ban has survived every major legal challenge brought against it. The National Firearms Act of 1934 first imposed strict regulations on automatic weapons, requiring registration and a tax. The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 went further, banning the manufacture and sale of new machine guns for civilian use entirely. Only machine guns manufactured and registered before May 19, 1986, can be legally owned by civilians, and they command prices in the tens of thousands of dollars on the legal market.
Courts have treated this ban as one of the most defensible firearms restrictions in American law. Even in Heller, Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion noted that the Second Amendment right is "not unlimited" and that the historical tradition supports prohibitions on "dangerous and unusual weapons." Lower courts have consistently placed machine guns in that category.
The Eleventh Circuit's decision reinforces that consensus. It does not break new ground so much as confirm what most federal courts have already concluded: whatever the outer boundaries of the Second Amendment may be after Bruen, they do not extend to fully automatic weapons.
That said, the broader landscape of firearms litigation remains volatile. Courts across the country are reviewing firearm statutes and regulations at every level, from state notice requirements to federal ownership bans. Each decision adds another data point to the still-developing post-Bruen map of the Second Amendment.
The Eleventh Circuit ruling can be appealed to the Supreme Court, though the justices would need to find a reason to take it up. Given the current consensus among circuits on the machine gun ban, a cert petition would face long odds unless the challengers can frame a novel question.
The bump stock case, by contrast, is already before the Court and will produce a decision that could reshape the ATF's regulatory authority over firearms accessories. If the Court strikes down the bump stock ban on statutory grounds, it would send a clear message: agencies cannot expand the reach of decades-old criminal statutes through rulemaking. Congress would need to act.
For now, the machine gun ban stands, and the Eleventh Circuit has added its voice to the chorus of courts holding that fully automatic weapons occupy a different constitutional space than the handguns, rifles, and shotguns at the core of Second Amendment protection.
The real question is not whether courts will uphold the machine gun ban. It is whether the principles courts use to draw that line will hold steady as new weapons, new accessories, and new regulatory theories keep pushing the boundaries of what counts as a protected arm. That question belongs to the Supreme Court, and the justices show no sign of being finished with it.
