Machine-gun charges tied to Orange Park man not dismissed despite new Supreme Court ruling

Steve Patterson, Florida Times-Union
·2 min read
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Semiautomatic rifles similar to the firearms that Delray Beach gun dealer Brandon Wexler had in this 2021 photo at his business, Wex Gunworks, were the kind of weapons prosecutors have said could be illegally converted into machine guns.
Semiautomatic rifles similar to the firearms that Delray Beach gun dealer Brandon Wexler had in this 2021 photo at his business, Wex Gunworks, were the kind of weapons prosecutors have said could be illegally converted into machine guns.

A U.S. Supreme Court decision defending gun owners’ Second Amendment rights didn’t invalidate a law regulating machine guns or the basis for a gun-crime indictment against a YouTube celebrity and an Orange Park man, a federal judge has concluded.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Marcia Morales Howard keeps attorneys  preparing for a trial, currently scheduled for January, to decide whether Clay County business owner Kristopher “Justin” Ervin and Wisconsin gun dealer Matthew Hoover illegally sold unregistered devices for converting mounds of semiautomatic rifles into fully automatic machine guns.

An indictment issued this summer described Ervin paying a machine shop early last year to create 3,600 small metal cards he sold under the brand name Auto Key Card, using ads on a YouTube channel Hoover operated that had 171,000 subscribers as of Friday.

This graphic appeared on a website federal agents said Kristopher Ervin used to sell card-shaped strips of metal laser-etched with a design that could convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun.
This graphic appeared on a website federal agents said Kristopher Ervin used to sell card-shaped strips of metal laser-etched with a design that could convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun.

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Prosecutors said the cards could be used to convert AR-15 style rifles into machine guns and that selling them without registering them like machine guns — making them subject to expensive government regulation — violated federal law.

But Hoover’s lawyers argued in July that a recent Supreme Court ruling on a gun-control lawsuit, New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n, Inc. v. Bruen, had the effect of invalidating machine gun restrictions dating back to the landmark National Firearms Act of 1934.

If the regulations weren’t valid, the lawyers said Hoover’s indictment had to be dismissed.

But Howard saw things differently.

“Hoover provides no basis for concluding that the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen would undermine this line of authority,” Howard ruled this week, adding that “his argument is unavailing.”

AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles similar to the one in this 2016 photo are sometimes turned into machine guns with conversion devices called auto-sears. Kristopher Ervin of Orange Park has been indicted on federal gun charges for mailing hundreds of items that prosecutors say work like auto-sears.
AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles similar to the one in this 2016 photo are sometimes turned into machine guns with conversion devices called auto-sears. Kristopher Ervin of Orange Park has been indicted on federal gun charges for mailing hundreds of items that prosecutors say work like auto-sears.

The judge said prosecutors had rightly pointed out that the Supreme Court case didn’t overturn its ruling on an earlier case, D.C. v. Heller, which judges had relied on before when “the Court suggested that it would be ‘startling’ for the Second Amendment to protect machineguns.”

Howard said the Supreme Court ruling on Heller “noted that the Second Amendment ‘only protects the right to own certain weapons.’” That ruling didn’t include a list of which weapons were or weren’t protected, but a string of courts since then had agreed that machine guns weren’t protected by the Second Amendment.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Judge rejects bid to dismiss machine-gun case tied to Florida man