For anyone else who tries something like this, they MUST ensure their lawyers address this issue of "Dangerous and Unusual" at the very inception and strangle this idiocy FIRST.
For example as part of the discovery and presentation phase as well as at argument something along the lines of....
To ensure that a full understanding of private, legal ownership of fully automatic and burst weapons is presented to the court and to assure that findings and judgment is based upon facts and not supposition.
1. There is no direct federal prohibition of private ownership of this class of weapon.
2. There are certain sharply defined limitations around this right specifically
that the primary restrictions and regulation are via The National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA), The Gun Control Act (GCA) of 1964 and The Firearms Owners Protection (FOPA) Act of 1986.
3. These acts do not prohibit but regulate private ownership and create and maintain a single federal register of these types of weapons along with their ownership.
4. The primary characteristics of the acts are the definition of what is a regulated weapon, the requirements to register or transfer said weapon, a one off $200 purchase and transfer tax and the closure of the registry to new weapons manufactured and registered after midnight, May 19th 1986.
5. Certain individual states apply further restrictions or prohibitions these are not within the purview of the federal legality of private ownership of a class of weapons.
6. The purchase and transfer of these registered weapons involves an extensive law enforcement background check and any individual, so long as this check reveals not restrictions or is not prohibited by the check of their local law may own and transfer said class of weapon.
It is therefore a statement of fact that all weapons of this type, when a part of the register are inherently legal as a class of weapon and owned by legal persons or entities in law.
Based upon an FOIA request the current registry has xxxxxxxx (circa 250,000) of this class of weapon recorded.
Since the enactment of, in particular the FOPA Act of 1986, there is no recorded incident of criminal activity where a registered weapon, in the ownership of it's private registered owner has ever been involved in the commission of a criminal firearms act.
Since these facts are not in question it is therefore inherently impossible to say that a class of some quarter of a million weapons, registered for over 22 years, with no direct criminal activities, can in any manner be classed as either "dangerous" or "unusual".
Based upon these facts and considering the arbitrary time based restriction of the registration and ownership of this class of weapon, it is arguably equally justifiable to say that opening the registry with the same degree of checks will but only not increase but may decrease criminal activity of this type.
Further the restriction under color of law of the closure of the registry is arbitrary at best.
I'm sure Constitution Cowboy et-al will have more legalese to add......