9th Circuit: Kittson didn’t sell machine gun to U.S. Government.

Daniel Kittson, an Oregon resident, facilitated the sale of a Russian machine gun to a customer he didn’t realize was a federal agent. He was easily convicted of illegally selling the weapon but had a novel defense.

Though federal law prohibits the transfer of machine guns, that prohibition does not apply to “a transfer to . . . the United States or any department or agency thereof.” This is remarkably true on a technical level, but the Ninth Circuit didn’t buy his defense. The Court rejected it in the name of “context.” The majority wrote: “Simply put, context matters, which is why we still have human beings interpret statutes, rather than MU-TH-UR 6000, Skynet, or Hal 9000 donning black robes.”

Believe it or not, there was one dissent. God bless Judge VanDyke for being that much of a textualist.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.