Confronting the Flawed Story Behind the First SCOTUS Second Amendment Case (Ft. Brian Frye)
About this episode
The episode discusses the Supreme Court case US v. Miller and its implications for the Second Amendment, featuring insights from law professor Brian Frye.
This week, we're looking back at the Supreme Court case that established the "common use" standard likely to play a major role in its new AR-15 case. That case is 1939's US v. Miller , and we have a guest with brand-new information that unsettles the official story of its namesake. Tulane law professor Brian Frye wrote the definitive account of Miller back in 2008, which ended up heavily influencing the Supreme Court's opinion in 2009's DC v. Heller . But, nearly 20 years later, he says the police and newspaper accounts about Jack Miller's life are now in dispute. Frye recounts the original narrative of the case, which reads like something out of a gangster movie. Miller was accused of being involved in multiple bank robberies, including a simultaneous heist at two Oklahoma banks. He then turned state's evidence and was later murdered by aggrieved gangsters. In between that time, he was arrested under the National Firearms Act (NFA) for transporting an unregistered sawed-off shotgun across state lines. An enterprising judge, who'd backed federal gun control as a congressman, then decided to use his prosecution as a test case for the NFA's constitutionality. In a truncated Supreme…
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