Ever read miller vs U.S. 1939? You might want to before you step in to this discussion on the consistency of the supreme court and the right to keep and bear arms.
A poorly written opinion for sure and wildly misread by anti-gunners but not inconsistent and not wrongly decided. It really does require a primer to understand it and the Court provided a cite for it,
Aymette v. State, 2 Humphreys (Tenn.) 154, 158.
I really have no argument with
Miller's protection criteria derived from Aymette and it was used to good effect in
Heller.
A true an honest assessment of
Miller's holding and
Aymette's protection criteria was the impetus for the decision in
Cases v. U.S, 131 F.2d 916 (1st Cir. 1942): (paragraph breaks added)
"At any rate the rule of the Miller case, if intended to be comprehensive and complete would seem to be already outdated, in spite of the fact that it was formulated only three and a half years ago, because of the well known fact that in the so called 'Commando Units' some sort of military use seems to have been found for almost any modern lethal weapon.
In view of this, if the rule of the Miller case is general and complete, the result would follow that, under present day conditions, the federal government would be empowered only to regulate the possession or use of weapons such as a flintlock musket or a matchlock harquebus.
But to hold that the Second Amendment limits the federal government to regulations concerning only weapons which can be classed as antiques or curiosities,-- almost any other might bear some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia unit of the present day,-- is in effect to hold that the limitation of the Second Amendment is absolute.
Another objection to the rule of the Miller case as a full and general statement is that according to it Congress would be prevented by the Second Amendment from regulating the possession or use by private persons not present or prospective members of any military unit, of distinctly military arms, such as machine guns, trench mortars, anti-tank or anti-aircraft guns, even though under the circumstances surrounding such possession or use it would be inconceivable that a private person could have any legitimate reason for having such a weapon.
It seems to us unlikely that the framers of the Amendment intended any such result."
And because of the unacceptable holding of
Miller, which rendered nearly all federal gun control invalid with its "in common use" and military usefulness protection criteria, this lower federal court ignored SCOTUS and in 1942, created the "militia right" interpretation of the 2nd Amendment.
The same year the 3rd Circuit inserted the "state's right" interpretation of the 2nd Amendment in the federal courts in
U.S. v. Tot, 131 F.2d 261 (3 rd Cir. 1942)
So yeah, I've read
Miller and all the case docs and all the cases that are cited in it and all the cases that cite it. One could say I've studied the case, what do you want to know?.