Will Machine Guns Ever Be Legal Again
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officer Jay Phillippi looks over a fully automatic Thompson machine gun that was turned in during a "Gifts for Guns" program in Compton, Calif., in 2005. Chris Carlson/AP hide caption
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Chris Carlson/AP
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officer Jay Phillippi looks over a fully automatic Thompson machine gun that was turned in during a "Gifts for Guns" program in Compton, Calif., in 2005.
Chris Carlson/AP
When President Obama laid out his proposals Wednesday to reduce gun violence, he included a call for Congress to ban "military-style assault weapons."
Lawmakers on Capitol Loma take tried banning certain guns before. Near two decades agone, they barred the sale of semiautomatic attack weapons, simply to let that law lapse ten years later. Just i gun ban has stayed on the books: a measure Congress passed a quarter-century agone making it illegal for civilians to purchase or sell whatsoever machine gun made from that date frontward. That legislation passed with the blessing of the National Burglarize Association, which now opposes gun control measures.
An Amendment
In April 1986, after months of efforts, the NRA had finally rallied enough back up in the Democratic-controlled Firm to forcefulness a pecker onto the flooring. The so-called Firearms Owners' Protection Act would disengage many of the provisions in the 1968 Gun Control Deed, passed shortly after Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were shot dead.
But just as the nib was about to come to a final vote in that tumultuous Firm session, New Jersey Democrat William Hughes introduced an amendment. It would forestall the sale to civilians of all machine guns made after the law took effect.
There were enough Democrats to pass the amendment, so nobody objected when the presiding officeholder, New York Democrat Charles Rangel, called for a voice vote rather than a coil phone call vote on the machine gun ban.
Quondam NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman, who has since parted ways with the organization, tells NPR that Wayne LaPierre, currently NRA's executive vice president, was willing to let the automobile gun ban go frontward if it meant the larger bill it was attached to would pass.
"I remember very well having dinner ... with Wayne LaPierre on the big victory afterwards it passed the House," he says. "And nosotros weren't too concerned almost the machine gun issue, but information technology came dorsum to haunt Warren Cassidy."
Opening The Door?
At the time, Cassidy headed the NRA's lobby, the Institute for Legislative Activeness. He confirms now that LaPierre, who did not respond to a request for comment, pushed hard to let the machine gun ban stand up.
"He said, 'I want to do information technology. I recall nosotros accept to do information technology.' So I said yeah, and that was the end of the story. Information technology passed, and equally nosotros learned immediately, an element of NRA, a very vociferous element of NRA ... determined that it merely couldn't be that way," Cassidy says. "We couldn't give an inch. I don't think they always forgave me for it."
Gun laws skilful Robert Spitzer of the Country University of New York at Cortland says the bill President Reagan signed into law was more than meaning than information technology was perceived at the time.
"Ane can view the Congress' action in 1986 to ban civilian possession of fully automated weapons equally something of a kind of a precedent that would open the door for restricting noncombatant access to semiautomatic, set on-style weapons," Spitzer says.
Spitzer says a major reason the machine gun ban met so little resistance was a 1934 law passed a calendar month after outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were killed in a hail of automobile gun bullets. It required machine gun owners to pay a hefty tax, be fingerprinted and be listed on a national registry.
Equally a result, he says, sales of machine guns plummeted.
"It is a good example of something that is picayune known, which is a gun control law that was pretty effective in keeping such weapons out of civilian hands," he says. "So past 1986, when the provision was added to the Firearm Owners' Protection Act to bar any newly produced fully automatic weapon from possession by civilians, it was really a fairly small step to make, because then few of them were in circulation to brainstorm with."
That'southward clearly not the instance with the semiautomatic guns that polls evidence a bulk wants banned today.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/01/18/169526687/the-decades-old-gun-ban-thats-still-on-the-books
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