Via WiscoDave, William Sullivan writing at American Thinker.

“Machine guns were outlawed because there was no need that justified the risk.  Was that wrong, too?” Cuomo asks.

The short answer is, yes, that was wrong, too — if the Second Amendment is the measure.  And to be clear, the Second Amendment is the only sentence in the Constitution where an individual right to firearms is addressed.

Yet we find several conservatives aligning with Cuomo, in principle, suggesting that automatic weapons, or “machine guns,” have understandably been banned since ancient times (for us), and it was somehow justified as within the government’s right to do so.  For example, Josh Hammer writes at the Daily Wire that, “automatic weapons are already (for all intents and purposes) banned” under the NFA, so new gun control measures on a “cosmetically amorphous” semi-automatic “assault weapons” should not be needed.

That statement not only concedes the left’s position that the federal government had the right to levy such infringements upon the individual right to gun ownership in the first place, but more importantly, it’s not entirely accurate.

I’ll assume that Hammer knows his history, and that by “all intents and purposes,” he means that the NFA made it nearly impossible for the common law-abiding citizen to attain an automatic weapon only because the cost was prohibitive for most common Americans due to the heavy tax laid upon the purchase of one.  It was egregious for the federal government to craft such a law, but perhaps the more important distinction is that there was no federal law suggesting that an American citizen couldn’t legally own a properly registered and purchased “machine gun” for more than 50 years after the NFA was passed, because it was clearly understood that a federal “ban” on such weapons was an infringement upon law-abiding citizens’ Second Amendment right.

In truth, automatic weapons were not actually “banned” in this country until 1986.  It wasn’t until the farcical passage of the Hughes Amendment as an addendum to the National Firearm Owners’ Protection Act (FOPA) of 1986 that ownership of any such firearm was truly “banned” by the federal government.

If you ever imagined that our elected betters are actively working toward the preservation of our constitutionally protected rights, watch this video of Charlie Rangel leading the House in a “voice vote” to allow the Hughes Amendment, and allowing only two minutes of raucous “deliberation.”  It is among the lowest and most ridiculous moments in the history of our American Congress — and that’s saying something.

It has been reported that President Reagan considered vetoing the FOPA due to the inclusion of the Hughes Amendment, but was convinced by the NRA to not do so, believing that the “Supreme Court would throw that measure out as unconstitutional,” thereby “correcting the defect in new law.”  That challenge to the unlawful “machine gun ban” never came.  And now, thirty-three years later, nothing could be more natural than Americans assuming that the federal government somehow has the right to ban whatever weapons it can successfully ban, even if it does so via legislative subterfuge.

If the “slippery slope” idiom ever has a meaningful application, this might be a good example of it.

In the end, it took 146 years of American history for the government to even make a sweeping effort toward a federal gun law restricting firearms among the law-abiding populace.  It took sly maneuvering to enact the first federal gun control, achieved only under the auspices of the government’s “right to tax” firearms, and an ensuing fifty years of the government purposely avoiding the notion of that government could “ban” any firearm (for fear of running afoul of the Second Amendment), before a Congressional circus in 1986 finally presumed that the government could actually “ban” automatic weapons.

Slippery slope indeed.  And this is why so many gun owners won’t budge any more.  Budging and compromising is what got us where we are today, with the expectation that Congress will only make more laws infringing on God-given rights, that they have a right and warrant to do that, and that the only recourse is to compromise and hold on to what little we can.

No more.