"Common use" by whom?

[maestro pistolero]

Since Scalia came out and said arms that are in 'common use at the time' are protected, wouldn't a ban on say 9mm with a 15 or so round capacity be extremely vulnerable to a challenge?

Even if the 'common use' term only refers to common use by the public, not military, (and I don't think that was the intent) a run of the mill, double stack, 9mm ought to be at the top of the list of protected weapons.

Am I missing something?

 

[MeekAndMild]

Maestro,

I knew there was a report about the AWB but it took me a minute to find it. Here is the link but be warned it is a huge PDF file so is less slow to download than to attempt to read from a browser.

www.sas.upenn.edu/jerrylee/research/aw_final2004.pdf

In section 2.4 the article mentions that around 1990 there were about 1 million privately owned "assault weapons" (what we jokingly call EBRs) in the US. The leading domestic gun makers manufactured about 500,000 EBRs from 1989-1993 so later in the article they estimated 1.5 million EBRs here in 1994. In that same year US gun owners possessed about 25 million guns that were equipped with large capacity magazines. I'd presume that of this 25 million were a few double stack 9mms. (I'll keep looking for the number, but numbers I found in other articles were about 730,000 semi-auto pistols made in 1980 and a million in 2000. Since pistols last a long time I'd wonder if there might be 20 million or so in the US by now? )

According to their table 5.4 there were about 5.5 million AR type rifles made from 1994-2001, however these must have been the not-evil-merely-misunderstood postban versions. According to table 7.2 there were 47 million large capacity magazines approved for import from 1994 to 2000 and about 10% of that number actually imported during those years.

I hope this helped. I think its safe to say that they're probably pretty common.