United States v. Miller (1939)

United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939) is a U.S. Supreme Court case that was crucial to Second Amendment jurisprudence for a majority of the 20th-century. In this case, the defendants were charged under the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) with “knowingly, willfully, and feloniously” transporting an unregistered short-barreled shotgun via interstate commerce without the NFA-required “tax stamp”. The defendants submitted a demurrer challenging the indictment on two grounds: 

  1. The NFA usurped the police power, reserved to the states in violation of the Tenth Amendment.
  2. The NFA is unconstitutional as a violation of the Second Amendment. 

The District Court sustained the demurrer on the Second Amendment grounds and quashed the indictment. On appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court spent little time on the Tenth Amendment argument; the Court held that the police power objection to be “plainly untenable.” Thus, the crucial issue is whether or not the NFA’s registration and stamp requirements violated the Second Amendment. The Court conducted the analysis through the lens of the “militia” component to the Second Amendment. Without evidence tending to show that a short-barreled shotgun “has some reasonable relationship to the preservation … of a well regulated militia” the Second Amendment does not protect the right to keep and bear such a weapon. In this particular case, there was no evidence presented that illuminated any role that the firearm in question had in relation to the militia, and there was no judicial notice of any fact to that extent either. Therefore the Court reversed and remanded the case. Although District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) later narrowed the scope of Miller, the former borrowed Miller’s definition and analysis of the term “militia” that appears in the Second Amendment. 

[Last reviewed in August of 2026 by the Wex Definitions Team]

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