From your post: Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense. "
This is why I said the court made a mistake - they didn't do their homework. Maybe it was - as you said - a result of Mr. Miller (who I believe was deceased by the time the Supremes heard oral arguments) had no one there to actually represent his side.
In any case, they were wrong about that. Sawed off shotguns had been used to great effect ALREADY in WW I. Not to mention bootleggers found them very useful for illicit perposes, when they couldn't get their hands a the sub-machine guns of those days.
So I again state my point that the USSC was unaware of the LEGITIMATE use (or uses) this type of weapon could have. During war, or as home protection, and on and on. They didn't do their homework, whether Miller had an attorney present or not, and they screwed up.
And whatever lower court looked at this case on the way back down ALSO screwed up. And for several decades now, somehow this case has been used by the anti-gun crowd to say some really stupid things.
So I again state my point that the USSC was unaware of the LEGITIMATE use (or uses) this type of weapon could have. During war, or as home protection, and on and on. They didn't do their homework, whether Miller had an attorney present or not, and they screwed up.
I'd be willing to bet that at the very least one of the Justices who heard the Miller case had personal knowledge of short-barrel shotguns as "trench guns" in WW-I.
The problem is, the US Supreme Court can't hear new evidence, it can only review what's been presented in lower courts. That's why they remanded the case for further proceedings.
Got it...I didn't quite understand your point. Just to flog this dead horse one more time, though, when the court said "it is not within judicial notice....", what that means is "Look, we (personally, not as judges) know guys used sawed-off shotguns as personal defense weapons in the last war, but you have to present that evidence to us. We're the court. We don't go do research on that sort of thing (in later years this would be called a form of judicial activism).)
My point is that it wasn't the court's job to go out and figure out whether a sawed-off shotgun was "...part of the military equipment...", in fact, you don't want courts doing that.
Now, this issue will be brought up again, and who knows what the results wil be. We'll find out. At least the door is open now, and we're on the offensive, which is much better than the endless rear-guard actions of the past 70 years.