Mike McIntire
speaker
322 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Mike McIntire’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Thanks, Terry, for having me.
Yeah, this particular case that the Supreme Court's agreed to take up promises to be pretty controversial and I think impactful.
As you pointed out, you know, when they take up these arguments in the fall and eventually come to a decision, the outcome is likely to turn not on big debates about public safety,
but on this rather arcane technical question of whether or not an AR-15 can be considered to be in common use.
This was a test that the Supreme Court itself created in an earlier gun rights case.
And essentially what it says is that if a gun is commonly used, if a lot of people have it, it's popular, it's protected by the Second Amendment and can't be banned.
And I think it's likely, given the court's recent history, that they probably will decide, the majority will, to overturn these bans.
There's nothing in the Constitution, the text or history of the Second Amendment that reflects this idea of a common use testing.
That is one of several things that the modern era Supreme Court since the Heller decision in 2008 has created to try to help lower courts navigate the possession and use of firearms, what's legal and what's not.
This is a question that the Federal Appeals Court in Illinois actually raised a few years ago when this very issue came up.
And the appellate justices took a very dim view, or at least a couple of them did, of
of the common use test, and they raise some of the issues you just did.
And one is just a simple logic problem.
Okay, so let's say in the case of fully automatic machine guns, for example, which are essentially not going to say outlawed, but they're very, very difficult to get in the United States.
That was because of a law passed in 1934.
Had that law not been passed, I have no doubt that a lot of gun enthusiasts would love to have a machine gun, and they probably would be in common use today.
And therefore, they would be considered protected under the Second Amendment.
So, this kind of circular logic of when, you know, constitutionality kind of winks on and off depending on how popular something is, is an issue that has really kind of confounded lower courts.
And it will be interesting to see how the Supreme Court tries to clarify that, if at all.
So this arose from the Heller decision that I mentioned earlier in 2008, which was a landmark case in which the Supreme Court for the first time found that the Second Amendment did protect an individual right to possess a gun in that particular case for defense, self-defense at home.
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