Every court that considered a case where the firearm manufacturer was the defendant, ruled in favor of the defendant (i.e. held the defendant immune from suit).

The courts have declined to give immunity to individual gun shops that sell to a strawman, or sell firearms to someone not legally eligible to buy one.

“an AR-15 machine gun”

First, it’s not a machinegun. It’s a non-automatic civilian rifle that happens to be the most popular centerfire target rifle in the United States, and one of the most common rifles U.S homes. As far as caliber, it’s a centerfire .22 and low-powered as rifles go, which is one of its selling points.

“the risk to innocent people”

Rifles, including AR-15’s, are the least likely of all civilian guns to be misused, accounting for fewer deaths annually than bicycles. See the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, Table 20, Murder by State and Type of Weapon. Out of 12,000 reported murders annually in the United States, all rifles combined account for less than 270 of them. That’s less than handguns, knives, clubs, shotguns, and even shoes and bare hands.

If the most popular rifle in America is also among the least misused of all weapons in America, is demonstrably less powerful than hunting rifles, and doesn’t fire any faster than an ordinary pistol or a typical .22, then it should be fairly easy to see that a suit that singles out that rifle as somehow more dangerous to the public than other civilian guns is ludicrous.

Subsequent cases are dishonest in their reasoning. In McDonald v Chicago, the issue before the Court was whether the right conferred by Heller was an “incorporated right” by the 14th Amendment, and hence applicable to the states or whether it was not. Almost all of the Bill of Rights had already been deemed incorporated by SCOTUS, so McDonald should have been a 9-0 decision. But it too was 5-4. Surprisingly, the dissenters had the “those blasted guns mentality,” instead of applying constitutional principles to see if the 14th Amendment incorporated the Second Amendment to the states.

But now, things really degrade. The lower courts are ignoring Supreme Court precedent established by McDonald and Heller: “that the Second Amendment protects a personal right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes, most notably for self-defense within the home.” And in McDonald, we recognized that the Second Amendment applies fully against the States as well as the Federal Government.

ARIE S. FRIEDMAN, ET AL. v. CITY OF HIGHLAND PARK, ILLINOIS, is one such case. The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld categorical bans on firearms that millions of Americans commonly own for lawful purposes, including the AR-15. Furthermore, an application for certiorari to the US Supreme Court fell on deaf ears and was denied by the Court, except for 2 dissents, Thomas and Scalia.

There are more instances where Circuit courts have misapplied McDonald and Heller. For example the Second Circuit in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. v. Cuomo, and Connecticut Citizens’ Defense League v. Malloy upheld New York and Connecticut’s ban on AR-15s among other semiautomatic firearms. I’m sure that the plaintiffs in these cases will also petition for certiorari. If the Supreme Court does not grant certiorari, then Heller and McDonald may only apply to Heller and McDonald, and not be general principles of law.

The plain language seems pretty clear to me. It does not presume, or create, some kind of dispensation from the government. Instead it states a clear, inherent right of people to own arms, and it prohibits the government from infringing upon that right.

Your reading of the Second Amendment has been explicitly rejected by the Supreme Court. In an abstract sense they can be wrong, but as far as US law is concerned, that pretty much settles it.

Being aware that misuse of an AR-15 poses a risk to innocent people is not the same as knowing that “the person to whom the product is supplied is likely to, and does, use the product in a manner involving unreasonable risk of physical injury to the person or others.”. That is a much higher standard.

Ok but there’s no constitutional right to do that. Congress could conceivably authorize someone to maintain their own private nuclear arsenal too. The fact that citizens could have such weapons with Congressional approval is not a sign that the Constitution gives everyone the right to have other weapons with no such approval.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/harry-siegel-sandy-hook-gavel-gun-article-1.2538148
http://www.nydailynews.com/tags/newtown-shooting

The people behind the suit are so wrong on the facts that it’s astonishing. The AR-15, was designed before the M16 and while it was presented to the military, the military rejected it as unsuitable for military use.

The M16 is a redesign of the AR-15 to make it suitable for military use.

PS

The AR in AR-15 does not stand for Assault Rifle. The company that originally designed the AR-15 platform is Armalite and they even sell bolt action rifles with model names in the form AR-X.