Unbelievable.
FOR more than 80 years, the United States has enforced a tough and effective gun control law that most Americans have never heard of. It’s a 1934 measure called the National Firearms Act, and it stands as a stark rebuke to the most sacred precepts of the gun lobby and provides a model we should build on.
Leaders of the National Rifle Association rarely talk about the firearms act, and that’s probably because it imposes precisely the kinds of practical — and constitutional — limits on gun ownership, such as registration and background checks, that the N.R.A. regularly insists will lead to the demise of the Second Amendment.
In speeches, publications and a steady stream of fund-raising literature, the N.R.A. rails against gun registration and gun owner databases. In 2008, the organization’s chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, claimed that photographing and fingerprinting gun owners was “the key gun control scheme” of the candidate Barack Obama, who, Mr. LaPierre predicted, would confiscate every gun in America before the end of his first term as president. The N.R.A. now says that the “real goal” of “gun control supporters” like Hillary Clinton is “ gun confiscation.”
But the longstanding National Firearms Act not only already mandated the registration of all owners of machine guns, short-barreled rifles, silencers and other weapons deemed highly dangerous at the time, it created a national database of those gun owners with their mug shots and fingerprints, and a detailed description of each weapon purchased, including its serial number. Purchasers of “N.F.A. weapons,” as they are known, must pass an F.B.I. background check, be approved by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms and pay a $200 tax. Stolen weapons must be reported to the A.T.F. immediately — the sort of requirement the N.R.A. opposes for other gun thefts.
The National Firearms Act includes much of what the N.R.A. fights against, but the lobbying group hasn’t directly challenged it. That may be because the firearms database, which includes weapons owned by both private citizens and law enforcement agencies, accounts for only a small percentage of the 300 million firearms estimated to be in private hands. Perhaps it should fight against it, though, because the 1934 law makes a good case against the N.R.A. The more than four million weapons inventoried — including machine guns, missiles, hand grenades and mortars — are the best example we have of gun control that works.
The N.F.A. was designed to control what today’s Justice Department calls “dangerous weapons that empower a single individual to take many lives in a single incident.” Millions of firearms now in private hands, including assault rifles designed for use by the military, are just as lethal as weapons covered by the N.F.A. They should be brought under the act.
Jeff Folloder, the executive director of the N.F.A. Trade and Collectors Association, says his members have learned to live with gun registration and lose no sleep worrying about confiscation. “There are still an enormous number of people who think if they register and purchase an N.F.A. weapon, they’re giving A.T.F. permission to come knock on their door at any time, and that’s just not true,” Mr. Folloder told me. “You’re not giving up any rights.”
The author, Alan Berlow, hocks this steaming pile of crap – or something analogous to it – everywhere he goes, from Salon to Politico. Anyone who is anyone in the progressive community gives him a voice to push his incitement to civil war.
One can always find a tool of the government to bolster his ideas, and this Jeff Folloder character is just that. I couldn’t be less interested in what he has to say. But take note that Mr. Berlow doesn’t mention the massive civil disobedience in New York, Connecticut and Oregon from their recent registration and confiscatory schemes. Neither will the New York Times conduct an investigatory series on that.
For those of us who say “not one more gun control law,” Mr. Berlow is clueless as to the resolve of the patriot community. If the federal government actually tried to do this, there would be bloodshed and violence, or otherwise simple civil disobedience and refusal to enforce said laws by the law enforcement community because they want to go home to families at the end of the day and not have to look over their shoulder for potential threats at 2300 hours when they take their dog out for the last piss of the night.
It’s sad that the New York Times is so disconnected from the ordinary population that they would give Mr. Berlow yet another opportunity to hock his crap. The LEOs aren’t going to enforce such a law, the Congress won’t pass such a law, and Mr. Berlow won’t do anything to enforce it himself. This is just a progressive wet dream – nothing more.
