As my regular reader will attest (Hi, Jeff!), I’m quite fond of the Colorado Politics Out West Roundup section. With the bulk of the U.S. population living east of the Mississippi River, it is understandable we get less national attention out here, and the Roundup section is an important summary of what is going on out west.

Though I want to focus mainly on one particular Roundup story this week, it’s worth mentioning the other stories CoPo has collected. In an interesting and likely overreach for power, Utah’s GOP leaders have initiated a lawsuit directly with the U.S. Supreme Court (which you can do in certain situation), asking for roughly half of the Utah lands controlled by the national government to be returned to state control. Utah especially wants to regulate the lands that produce energy, graze cattle, are open for recreation, and other uses. Size wise, Utah wants a section as large as South Carolina back.

Stay up to speed: Sign up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

It’s a long shot at best. There are a couple centuries of precedent out there affirming the national government is supreme to state governments. I used to teach about the famous McCulloch vs. Maryland case of 1819, which rejected an attempt by the state government of Maryland to tax the land upon which sat a federal bank. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled the power to tax is the power to destroy, and a state can never have that power over a federal entity. Hence the principle of national sovereignty over states.

I’m not a lawyer but I suspect McCulloch will win the day, though with today’s radical activist and political court, I wouldn’t be too surprised if they did flip centuries of precedent and rule for Utah, which would, of course, open the floodgates for states to sue to “get their lands back.” We’ll see.

And as more evidence that today’s GOP, a Trumpian cult and not the honorable organization it once was, is open to most anything, also in Utah (a state government 100% owned and operated by the GOP) we see the state legislature trying to get the voters of Utah to give them more power, at the cost of their own power. They even held a special session of the state legislature to put an initiative on the autumn ballot that would, essentially, allow the state government to change, or even cancel, state ballot measures passed by the people in an election. If a majority says yes, the legislature could rewrite voter-approved measures or even just cancel them.

Now, ironically, I’m generally against citizen ballot measures, as the legislature should be doing the job of legislating, and all too often, ballot initiatives are cleverly worded to hide their real intention and are designed to deny other groups their fundamental rights. I believe we elect legislators to legislate. They have the time to truly focus on proposed legislation and to decide if it is in the state’s best interest.

That said, the effort in Utah seems cynical at best, as the GOP, which has traditionally at least claimed to be the party that believes in small government, wants to dramatically and fundamentally increase the power of the legislature. Hypocrisy just isn’t a problem for the Trumpers, and that’s a pity.

But the Out West item that really got my attention this week was a decision by, you guessed it, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Kansas, that machine guns are OK under the Second Amendment. This is, my friends, not only nuts but also dangerous.

I’ve written before (heck, last week!) on what some reasonable standards might be for reasonable gun limits. Though the Founders intended the Second Amendment to protect gun ownership, you would have to be either a lunatic or profoundly naïve to think there should be no limits on what weapons you can buy. I have a few pistols and a Brown Bess musket (connected to my work portraying Alexander Hamilton), but I don’t have a flamethrower. And I don’t think you should have one either. You shouldn’t be able to buy a grenade launcher nor a nuke. This is just common sense.

And as I’ve mentioned before, there are three questions you can ask yourself to help determine if a weapon should be available to “regular” citizens outside military applications. How fast does it shoot, how far does it shoot, and how many rounds can you shoot before reloading? A machine gun (though admittedly there is a wide variety of weapons that can be called by that name) violates all three of my “rules.”

Judge John W. Broomes, based in Wichita, said, in dismissing two different machine gun possession against a fellow whom I’m glad is not my neighbor, that machine guns were legal under the Second Amendment because, well, I’ll let him tell you himself: “The court finds that the Second Amendment applies to the weapons charged because they are ‘bearable arms’ within the original meaning of the amendment” which appears to mean that since you can carry it, it’s legal.

That, dear friends, is nuts. And worse than nuts, it is profoundly dangerous. I guess you can’t carry a tank, so tanks are banned, but the aforementioned flamethrowers and grenade launchers? By this judge’s reasoning, those weapons are okie-dokie to own. A suitcase-sized nuke? Hmmm.

Normally, I wouldn’t worry too much, as SCOTUS has ruled many times machine guns fall outside Second Amendment protections. But today’s Roberts Court, radical and activist, might very well decide machine guns are OK after all, and at that point, I pity an law enforcement officer sent to a home for a possible crime or spousal abuse, given they might be outgunned from the moment of their arrival.

I’m not anti-gun. Heck, as I’ve said, I own some. But as a former (part-time) military cop, I sincerely hope Judge Broome’s extreme and dangerous interpretation of the Second Amendment is overturned, for the sake of cops, family members and people who might want to attend an outdoor concert in Las Vegas.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.