Way back in 1934, the U.S. government was concerned about the number of machine guns and sawed off shotguns being used for criminal activities. That concern lead Congress to pass its first gun control law, called the National Firearms Act. While it didn’t ban these guns, it imposed what at the time was a very heavy tax for owning one.
The law laid out a definition of “machine gun” that reads:
“[A]ny weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manually reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”
Its intention was to reduce crime by reducing the number of seriously dangerous weapons in the hands of the general public.
Congress was a lot smarter and a lot more independent way back in 1934.
Since that time, there have been several changes to gun control law. There was the 1968 Gun Control Act. (Can you even imagine a member of the current Congress using the phrase ‘gun control’ in a law?) That law established more controls on the importation or sale of guns with “no sporting purpose.” It kept the tax on machine guns in place, and added a more complex application process.
In 1986 another law was passed preventing the government from creating a registry of firearms. In order to get the bill passed, it was amended to further limit the ownership of machine guns. It said that no new machine guns could be owned or manufactured after May 19, 1986. While not an outright ban, the law did mean that machine guns were increasingly older and more difficult to obtain.
Logical and sane, once again.
The Huffington Post is reporting that a recent challenge to the 1986 law has failed in federal court. Hoo-rah!
A Texas gun owner wanted to trick out his legal AR-15 to make it into an illegal M-16.
What’s the difference, you ask?
With an AR-15 semi-automatic weapon, you have to keep pulling the trigger to fire off an endless blast of bullets. The guy in Texas didn’t want to have to go through all the effort of twitching his trigger finger, and sued for the right to alter his weapon into a fully automatic gun.
He and his lawyers tried to claim that the Second Amendment protects the right to own machine guns because, they claim:
“M-16 is the quintessential militia-styled arm for the modern day.”
Thank God, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously disagreed with him. It ruled that the machine guns of today are far more dangerous than anything required for militia use. It ruled that the famous Second Amendment was intended to protect local militias. Individuals have the right to own guns for militia use, and the machine gun was not exactly what the Founders had in mind.
Could this ruling perhaps signal a slight return to common sense in the world of gun control?
We’ll have to wait to see what the Supreme Court looks like in the next few years to be able to tell for sure.
Meanwhile, the gun crazies are working hard to keep themselves armed to the teeth. Watch:
Featured image by Kevin Vance via Flickr. Available through Creative Commons Attribution No-derivs 2.0 Generic License.
