Epic Failure: Short Barreled Rifles Were Not Intended To Be Regulated By The NFA
BY Herschel Smith
3 years, 5 months ago
Dean Weingarten writing at Ammoland.
It was a major piece of legislation, arguably the first time the Federal Government had significantly infringed on the right to keep and bear arms, protected by the Second Amendment.
Attorney General Cummings was asked to testify before the powerful Ways and Means Committee in the House, which was considering the bill.
In the original bill, the focus was on pistols and revolvers, short-barreled shotguns, concealable firearms, silencers, and machine guns. Short barreled rifles were not included.
[ … ]
Representative Harold Knutson, of Minnesota, asks Attorney General Homer Cummings if he may add “rifles” to the bill and raise the barrel length to 18 inches, to protect deer hunting rifles in his home state. Cummings is bewildered by the request. It does not make any sense. Eventually, Cummings says it is acceptable to him, to gain the approval of Representative Knutson. Cummings needs the votes on the committee to pass the bill. From the hearing:
Mr.KNUTSON. General, would there be any objection, on page 1, line 4, after the word” shotgun” to add the words” or rifle” having a barrel less than 18 inches? The reason I ask that is I happen to come from a section of the State where deer hunting is a very popular pastime in the fall of the year and, of course, I would not like to pass any legislation to forbid or make it impossible for our people to keep arms that would permit them to hunt deer.
Attorney General CUMMINGS. Well, as long as it is not mentioned at all, it would not interfere at all.
Mr. KNUTSON. It seems to me that an 18 -inch barrel would make this provision stronger than 16 inches, knowing what I do about firearms.
Attorney General CUMMINGS. Well, there is no objection as far as we are concerned to including rifles after the word” shotguns” if you desire.
After this exchange, Representative Knutson fades from the picture. He has a few questions later. On page 87, he makes sure that rifles with barrels over 18 inches are exempted from the bill.
Quinn Otto-Moudry makes the same observation in an article in The Cornell Review examining the NFA hearings, in September of 2020 …
[ … ]
In the remaining transcripts, the focus is on pistols, machine guns, and sawed-off shotguns. Rifles are barely mentioned. Sawed-off shotguns are referred to repeatedly.
The record is clear. Today, we deal with the bizarre regulatory world where short-barreled rifles are tightly regulated and taxed, while pistols with virtually the same capability, only more concealable, are honored and recognized by the Supreme Court as protected by the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
I knew that from reading the transcript (yes, I actually spent the time to read the entire transcript of the awful, ignorant proceeding). But thanks to Dean for bringing this back up again.
In the main, idiotic prohibition laws created gangsters. Stupid movies demonized suppressors (which is badly needed today for hearing protection, something OSHA would tell you too).
So in order to respond to the problem they created from prohibition, and in order to be out in front of scary Hollywood movies, they doubled down on stupid and created the NFA.
Handguns are much more devastating than SBRs, suppressors or anything regulated by the NFA, so look for increased attention to pistols to address inner city crime, a problem that Congress created themselves by the evisceration of the inner city family by rendering it fatherless.
Here is the paradigm. Congress creates problems by doing something stupid, Congress tries to address the problems they create by doing more stupid things, and then Congress doubles down and makes matters worse by compounding their “solutions” (which is a description of the GCA, a compounded problem that exacerbates the stupidity of the NFA). It’s stupid (the GCA) on top of stupid (the NFA) on top of stupid (prohibition and Hollywood).
At some point we need a year of Jubilee where all laws become null and void so we can throw the bums out and start over.
I repeat myself. If you hired every gun mechanic working for FN from its Columbia, S.C. factory and put them in office and in the bureaucracy, we’d be much better off than with the elected politicians. Or if you want to keep your good pistols, then just hire dogs from the local dog park. We’d still be better off.
On June 15, 2021 at 12:29 am, Archer said:
Seen on a “demotivational” poster (a parody of the motivational posters common in offices):
GOVERNMENT — If you think the problems we create are bad, just wait until you see our solutions!
It’s true in a lot of contexts. Far too many, in my humble opinion.
On June 15, 2021 at 10:14 am, SGT.BAG said:
What you allow is what will continue.
On June 15, 2021 at 11:59 am, Brad said:
I share your concern over upcoming hand gun legislation. I have an app on my phone, recommended by a prepper buddy, that does a good job of reporting news you don’t normally hear. Locally and nationally. Every morning there are alerts of at least 1 “mass shooting”. Yesterday there were four. It’s off the hook. Virtually all involved hand guns. Just wait for the trigger puller to be white and then the manure will hit the ventilator.
On June 15, 2021 at 3:56 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Brad
Re: “I share your concern over upcoming hand gun legislation. I have an app on my phone, recommended by a prepper buddy, that does a good job of reporting news you don’t normally hear. Locally and nationally. Every morning there are alerts of at least 1 ‘mass shooting’.”
Where the deep-state and its would-be gun-banning allies are concerned, it is germane to note that their preferred means of advancing their agenda is via manufactured crisis. Usually in the form of false-flag acts of terror, but also seizing upon naturally-occurring events and using them when possible.
Most ordinary people have no idea how common these sorts of operations are within the intelligence community, both within the U.S. and other nations as well.
World War Two in Europe was kicked off by a false-flag event, for example. There is considerable evidence that our involvement in SE Asia was done on the same basis with the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
The evidence is firmer in the case of Nazi Germany, because of testimony by witnesses at the Nuremberg Trials. SS Major Alfred Naujocks led the false-flag operation that attacked several German radio stations along the Polish-German frontier adjacent to the Danzig Corridor. German Chancellor Adolf Hitler wanted a pretext to attack Poland and seize the corridor, which divided Germany from East Prussia, but Poland would not give him one – so he and his advisors decided to let the SS-Gestapo manufacture one.
A number of concentration camp inmates were clothed to resemble Poles and others Germans, machine-gunned and then staged at the Sender Gleiwitz radio station and a number of other similar facilities, which were shot-up and made to look as if they had been attacked. Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels and the German media (radio, still and motion-picture photography) took care of the rest.
Subsequently, Germany launched its blitzkrieg attack across the Polish border on the morning of September 1, 1939. Naujocks was in overall command of the false-flag operation, which has since been known as the Gleiwitz Incident.
It is nearly-certain that at least some of the “mass shootings” being reported in the U.S. at present are, in-part or wholly, hoaxes and/or false-flag events. It is not always possible to determine conclusively which ones, but enough irregularities have been uncovered at enough events of this kind to suggest that something very fishy is going on. A case in point was the Las Vegas, Nevada mass-shooting in October 2017 at the Route 91 Harvest music festival.
The official narrative is that 64 year-old Stephen Paddock, a classic example of the resentful white male loner, opened fire on the festival and – using a bump-stock-equipped AR15 and other weapons, managed to kill 60 people and wound 411 more from his 32nd floor suite in the Mandalay Bay Hotel.
The official account does not hold up well at all to dispassionate critical scrutiny, however, for any number of reasons. Perhaps the most-compelling evidence is that some of the attendees at the country music festival were armed forces veterans, including veterans of ground combat. These individuals reported that the aural and visual signatures of the weapons used did not resemble those of a bump-stock equipment carbine or rifle, but rather a crew-served automatic weapon such as a SAW (squad automatic weapon) M249 light machine gun. Moreover, the shots originated from multiple firing positions on multiple floors of the hotel, according to these eye-witnesses, and not from the alleged shooter’s suite.
Many other questions have emerged, for which the official explanation is inadequate. How did one man manage to get so much gear, and so many weapons and ammunition for them, into his suite unobserved? Luxury resorts in places like Las Vegas are some of the most-surveilled real-estate on the planet, not just because of the guests and their safety but because of the amount of cash and other wealth changing hands.
There are additional other problems with the official account, and the FBI – which took over the investigation from Las Vegas police – have a recent and well-proven record of lying to the American public. To be blunt, given its recent track record, why should the people of this country trust the Bureau to be honest and forthright about such events?
In closing, too, there is the almost clockwork regularity at which these mass shooting events happen right around the time another push is being made by gun-controllers to attain their objectives. As Ian Fleming once said quite correctly, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”
The time for uncritical acceptance of government and mass-media accounts as authoritative in such matters is long-past. Informed skepticism is the watchword of the times in which we live. Especially when it comes to people who have been caught lying through-their-teeth in the past.
On June 15, 2021 at 4:47 pm, Brad said:
@Georgiaboy61
I’d love to sit down with you and discuss Las Vegas. When it happened every one knew it was bull shit. But it’s been proven reining down lead, some what accurately at that yardage, with a Bump Stock is next to impossible. We will never know. But we all know when were being lied to.
I made my first comment today before the FBI announced they’d be cracking down on Domestic Terrorists. They went on to say prosecuting domestic terrorists is much tougher then prosecuting foreigner because domestic terrorists have rights. Then they defined a domestic terrorists. “Potentially anyone that’s not happy with the government”. Wow.