Machine gun history
While legal scholarship on firearms has grown tremendously since I first started writing on the issue in the late 1980s, one topic that has never been addressed in detail in any law journal is machine guns. My new article in the Wyoming Law Review, Machine Gun History and Bibliography, aims to fill the gap.
The article appears in a symposium issue of the Wyoming Law Review, based on papers presented at a 2024 conference held by the law school’s Firearms Research Center, where I am a senior fellow. This was the first law school symposium ever on the National Firearms Act of 1934, one of the two foundational federal gun control statutes.
Of the five other articles in the symposium issue, one of my favorites is The Tradition of Short-Barreled Rifle Use and Regulation in America, by Joseph G.S. Greenlee. While this is not the first article about NFA regulation of short-barreled rifles (SBRs), it is the first to examine in depth the history of SBRs, which before the 1934 NFA imposed a $200 tax on them, were quite common. And they’re common today too; as of May 2024, there were 870,286 registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record, which is maintained by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. (ATF, Firearms Commerce in the United States, Statistical Update 2024, p. 12.)
My other favorite in the symposium is Stephen Halbrook’s The Power to Tax, The Second Amendment, and the Search for Which “Gangster’ Weapons” to Tax. In brief, the NFA bill as introduced also included handguns, but they were removed from the bill at the insistence of the National Rifle Association and the National Guard Association, which
Article from Reason.com
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