It is my understanding that ownership of a machine gun/fully automatic weapon is heavily restricted/prohibited in the US.
My questions are, how was this feat achieved with the 2nd Amendment in place?
Are there reliable statistics showing if the ban has been effective in reducing homicide with a fully automatic weapon?
Hypothetically, what’s to stop a similarly enacted ban on semi automatic weapons leaving just shotguns, bolt action rifles and revolvers as legal to own?
Thanks.
Well, to buy a full auto I need to fill out a BATF form, get fingerprinted, detail the storage of said weapon to my local law enforcement officer, get a background check, and pay a $200 transfer fee.
So no big deal.
Hypothetically? Nothing. Realistically? 200+ years of jurisprudence, LOTS of voters, and the NRA.
So how did the ban on fully automatic weapons take place?
Ok, not sure if that is sarcastic or not. So it IS a big deal or it isn’t?
Why not have the same kind of checks for semi automatic weapons?
I think it depends on ones definition of ‘Big Deal’. My understanding of this issue (defined by the National Firearms Act) is that you have to have an extensive background check AND your name goes into a government database of automatic weapon owners.
This last issue, a database seems to be banned for all other weapons. The interestingly named “Firearm Owners Protection Act” or FOPA, bans any permanent registry of gun owners at the State or Federal level. This is one thing that blocks the same treatment for semi-automatic weapons - someone in the government might know who owns them.
(I’m no expert on this, so others might be able to provide more details)
A key point that has been left out of this thread was the the BATFE machine gun registry was frozen in 1986. Only machine guns that were already registered can still be bought or sold by private citizens. This had the immediate effect of causing the prices of that finite pool of weapons to skyrocket. Full auto is something for people who have a not inconsiderable amount of disposable income. The cheapest submachine guns I’ve seen advertised in the last few years started at $3000-$4000 dollars for MAC clones and other sheet metal or seamless tubing guns. Want something like that M-16 you had in the Army? $15k and up.
restricted yes, prohibited no.
self explanatory. They are allowed because of the 2nd Amendment.
I’ve never heard of one used in reducing homicides and of the people I know who own them they would not use one for such a purpose. A bit of a strawman question.
Well there has to be a ban on them in order for a similar ban to be in effect.
Quick history lesson. The National Firearms Act of 1934 was the first law to restrict weapons capable of fully automatic fire. Those weapons, along with certain other clases of weapons such as short barrel shotguns, became regulated under the act to require a $200 tax stamp and a lot of paperwork and approval to own such a weapon. The price was meant to be prohibitive - so that they could technically say it wasn’t a ban, but ather a tax - but you start putting a $200 (in 1934 dollars) tax on $10 guns, and no one but the rich can own them.
But still, at least tens of thousands of these weapons were registered, to at least tens of thousands of owners. I suspect these numbers go into the hundreds of thousands, but I don’t have the data offhand. For 52 years, no one ever used one of these weapons to commit a crime. A perfect record. If you were so inclined, you could say that gun control actually worked in this instance - who could own the guns was heavily regulated, and no harm was ever done with them.
(Some will claim that 2 crimes were committed with such weapons, but it’s misunderstanding. The 2 crimes involved were committed by police officers who got their weapons through their departments, which isn’t related to the same process that private citizens would get these guns)
So in 1986, a new proposal came up as part of the Firearms Owner’s Protection Act. Manufacture and registration of these fully automatic weapons would come to a halt. Existing weapons could still be owned, but no new ones could be built or registered, effectively banning them. There was no impetus for this ban. There were no big stories about misuse of the weapons. There were no crimes committed with these weapons. This was just a case of gun control advocates pushing any possible anti-gun legislaton that they could.
So let’s review. The weapons become tightly regulated in 1934. They have a 50 year perfect record - no crimes committed, no accidental shootings, nothing. The control measures, if you’re inclined to interpret it that way, worked perfectly. The legal owners of these weapons behaved themselves perfectly.
And yet despite this, they were banned anyway.
Gun control advocates aren’t interested in actually solving problems, nor preserving the freedoms of anyone. They are only interested in pursuing an agenda of pushing any restriction they can manage to pass, no matter how ineffective, nonsensical, or just flat out bad.
A restriction on fully automatic weapons isn’t completely stupid, for starters. The 1986 law is for the reason SenorBeef mentions and I’d personally put burst fire on the semi-automatic side of the equation, but at heart, if you have good fire discipline full auto is pretty irrelevant.
Oh come now, this is the sort of stupidity that derails an otherwise reasoned discussion.
…Anyway, I sympathize with MrFloppy’s confusion because I asked essentially this same question yesterday. If the Second Amendment guarantees the right to “arms”, all possible arms should be available to the citizenry with deference to the reality that rights are not absolute and we should be able to prevent felons and psycopaths from owning operational tanks capable of shelling their neighborhood.
Hoever nice, ordinary people like me ought to be able to own that tank because I would never shell anyone. But I can’t. Even though The Constitution seems to say I should be able to. So who decided that my right to arms incudes an anti-tank gun, but not shells for my tank? What objective standards differentiate between legal and illegal arms?
Why was fully automatic registration banned in 1986, if not my explanation?
The Second Amendment’s meaning is not without controversy, and the history of jurisprudence even including Heller (the most recent, big gun control Supreme Court ruling) have all held that regulations were permissible. Guns were regulated as early as the 18th century and a court case in the 30s challenging the NFA held that guns can be regulated.
So in summation, fully automatic weapons were heavily regulated because nothing in precedent in our legal system says you can’t regulate firearms ownership.
Yes, essentially fully automatic weapons are never used in homicides. I know of a case or two where a police officer who had different access to automatic weapons used them.
You see bad guys fighting police with automatic weapons all the time in movies and on TV, but the truth of the matter is that just doesn’t happen in real life.
FWIW the ban went into effect in large part in response to a “perception” that the mafia and other gangsters were acquiring large numbers of Thompson submachine guns and using them in crimes. (They did use some in crimes, but it was never as prevalent as history or even the public back then has portrayed it.)
After Heller, it’s arguable semiautomatic weapons are “weapons in common usage”, so possibly Heller would need to be overturned. At the least you’d need a court with one less Republican appointee and one more Obama appointee to sustain such a law in our current reality, though. (The bar for passing an outright ban on semiautos would be so high that it’d never get to the SCOTUS, in the reality.)
Thanks for the info so far.
So if I wanted to purchase a machine gun, I pay the $200 and get the background check. Then I can get one??
Are there any stats for the number of illegal fully automatic weapons in circulation despite the heavy restrictions on legal purchases?
If you honestly believe that nobody could have supported that ban simply out of a desire to do good and solve problems, I can’t imagine what I’d say to change your mind. Maybe the freedom to not be mowed down in a hail of bullets must be weighed against the freedom to own the mower?
Not really, the 1986 law solved no ongoing social problem and was undertaken for confusing reasons. To be honest gun control in America has never taken a rational perspective. Liberals in America just want to try and ban weirdly specific types of guns, usually not even the guns used in crimes. Like some states started banning huge .50 cal rifles, a specialist weapon almost exclusively owned by hobbyists and like fully automatic weapons almost never used in crimes.
Look at Germany, Sweden, Norway…countries with reasonable gun control laws. They took a different approach: regulate gun owners and license them. Germany of the three has the most restrictive laws, but in all three countries you can own semiautos, in Sweden you can actually get license to own full automatics. In Norway you can buy a silencer for $10 off any store shelf (they are hundreds here because you have to go through the same NFA process to get a .50 cal machine gun as you do to get a legal silencer.)
Not all gun control is bad, but it’s inarguable, if you compare reasonable gun control that works in European countries American liberals have taken a “gun-oriented” instead of “owner-oriented” approach and it results in laws that do nothing and make even reasonable people feel that gun control is hopeless or foolish.
Not everything has objective standards. The Constitution leaves wide latitude for Congress to pass laws based on their best judgment. Precedent shows that the Second Amendment has not been interpreted to mean citizens have a right to any and all weapons or a right to unregulated ownership. The Supreme Court interprets law and when the constitution is vague, as it is with the Second Amendment, Congress typically has wide latitude. No one knows what limits the SCOTUS says are okay, but they say “you do not have unlimited gun ownership rights” and “you can’t outright ban guns in common usage, and gun ownership is an individual right.” There is a vast chasm between those boundaries left unfleshed out by any court precedent. Which means it is primarily a legislative issue.
Thus there are no objective boundaries or barriers, only political ones.
Not a straw man question. Presumably prior to 1934, machine guns were a problem - Al Capone and all that. What happened after 1934? Are there stats on homicide by fully auto weapons after 1934?
You’re talking about a solution in search of a problem. Nobody was being mowed down by civilian-owned automatic weapons even before the ban.
No. You have to get approval from the ATF (which is typically pro forma if you pass background check etc.) But you also need a signature from a CLEO (Chief Law Enforcement Officer) this typically means the municipal chief of police in your city or the county sheriff in your county. You only need their signature, not technically their approval. Legally in most States, the CLEO has no obligation to sign, and in many States as a matter of course they will not sign any NFA documents and thus you cannot legally get the weapon.
There have been court cases in which people have sued CLEOs for not signing their NFA document as that was the only thing holding them up, and they have lost.
However, some States, the very pro-gun States, have passed legislation that legally requires a CLEO to provide a signature to authorize a Federal NFA transfer if the person passes the other requirements. But the CLEO discretionary party means depending on where you lived it might be an outright impossibility to legally acquire an automatic weapon.
Further, some individual States could have State laws which outright ban automatic weapons. The NFA regulates ownership of automatic weapons at the Federal level, but nothing would stop a State from banning them outright.
When have cannons been included in the 2nd amendment? You’re using an argument that doesn’t exist.