Americans are a people of tradition. We celebrate holidays throughout the year to honor people, to commemorate certain events, and even to cheer on a team we want to win the Super Bowl. Traditions like these helped form the very foundations of the great United States of America. We pass these traditions down to our children, just as they were passed down to us by those who came before us. We learn what it means to be American. This can range from voting in every election to eating every other meal at McDonalds. This is a legacy that has been left to us and that we create. There are policies in government that help protect our traditions and reaffirm their meaning and values. In Brown v. Board of Education we discarded the idea of ​​separate but equal. In the case Marbury v. Madison we had a judicial review. These cases have helped shape government policy the right way and contribute to every single part of our daily lives. Policies like those gleaned from these cases make America a land of opportunity. One was that people, all people, have individual rights and freedoms. Among these rights are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In the Constitution there is an article in particular that offers the individual the possibility of protecting these rights, if necessary, with violent methods. There have always been people who deny that guns, in any form, are not necessary for the general public and are not part of our heritage nor our history. That said, it is undeniable that in the courts and in our homes, weapons of any kind play an important role in our lives, whether spoken about or in physical form. Therefore, the concept of guns is a legacy that has been built for us Americans and is intertwined with… middle of paper… law passed. The idea of ​​this act was to decrease the ownership and possession of "gangster" weapons which included short barreled firearms and machine guns. Instead of banning them entirely, the federal government decided to impose an extremely high tax on property transfers. Back then the transfer fee was $200 with a $2000 fine and jail time for not paying it. In today's monetary values ​​that would be over $3500 and $35,300. The goal of taxing them abolished was highly possible. United States v. Miller was the challenge to the constitutionality of this law. In it, the Supreme Court ruled that the 2nd protected only weapons suitable for military purposes and not those that “constitute the arsenal of the public enemy.” This case demonstrated to the public how laws can be interpreted with different meanings depending on who translates them.