Watch the entire video. First of all, Stephen is and friend and one of the best second amendment attorneys out there so we should show him some support. Through GOA and his own firm he has shown resilience and class in dealing with the FedGov, and has achieved a good degree of success in his cases.

Second, after this video, you might be interested in the second one.  A defining and signal characteristic of communist societies is that they hire incompetents and promote the lazy.  Communism isn’t just for the central bureaucracy.  It’s for the distributed bureaucracies too.

As long as you’re incompetent but support the status quo, as long as you don’t rock the rulers’ boat, and as long as you make income for the elitists, you’re welcome in the bureaucracy administrating a lack of justice to the peasants.  If you work for the government, you might be a peasant too, but you’re their peasant.

Stephen is a prime example.  He’s a good and hard working attorney. He could never work for the FedGov and be happy.

On Saturday evening my wife and I dined at a restaurant where a number of very old firearms were behind glass on the wall, from muskets to pistols of all sorts, including what I knew to be a “Sunday Gun.”  I joked to a fellow who happened to be in line behind me that the ATF wouldn’t like this gun.  He laughed and replied, “Yea, they would need to take that folding stock off of it to make them happy.”

The NFA was promulgated with pretentions of a so-called “war on crime.”  We’ve had a war on crime, a war on poverty, and a war on guns, and today we’re recapitulating the war on crime schtick.  Everyone wants to fight a war, or at least use war as an excuse to do what they otherwise may not get approval to do.

One must remember the nexus of hunting and conservation in the minds of the men who voted for the NFA, or at least recall how powerful the hunting and conservation lobby was even one hundred years ago.

William Hornaday, Director of NY Zoological Park, was the first to use the term “wildlife.”  His ideas were very influential, but also dovetailed with the ideas in vogue in the “gentleman hunt clubs” in America.  Read here, the more well-to-do as opposed to the “poors.”

In his seminal (but badly wrong as history shows) piece entitled Our Vanishing Wild Life – its Extermination and Preservation, he makes a number of bold assertions, and apparently had the support of a number of very influential hunting clubs.  These quotes would be anathema today – no one with any sense would go on record saying things like this.  So this is unadulterated and unvarnished history at its finest.

The “Sunday Gun.” —A new weapon of peculiar form and great deadliness to song birds, has recently come into use. Because of the manner of its use, it is known as the “Sunday gun.” It is specially adapted to concealment on the person. A man could go through a reception with one of these deadly weapons absolutely concealed under his dress coat! It is a weapon with two barrels, rifle and shot; and it enables the user to kill anything from a humming-bird up to a deer. What the shot-barrel can not kill, the rifle will. It is not a gun that any sportsman would own, save as a curiosity, or for target use.

The State Ornithologist of Massachusetts, Mr. E.H. Forbush, informs me that already the “Sunday gun” has become a scourge to the bird life of that state. Thousands of them are used by men and boys who live in cities and towns, and are able to get into the country only on Sundays. They conceal them under their coats, on Sunday mornings, go out into the country, and spend the day in shooting small birds and mammals. The dead birds are concealed in various pockets, the Sunday gun goes under the coat, and at nightfall the guerrilla rides back to the city with an innocent smile on his face, as if he had spent a day in harmless enjoyment of the beauties of nature.

The “Sunday gun” is on sale everywhere, and it is said to be in use both by American and Italian killers of song-birds. It weighs only two pounds, eight ounces, and its cost is so trifling that any guerrilla who wishes one can easily find the money for its purchase. There are in the United States at least a million men and boys quite mean enough to use this weapon on song-birds, swallows, woodpeckers, nuthatches, rabbits and squirrels, and like other criminals, hide both weapon and loot in their clothing. So long as this gun is in circulation, no small bird is safe, at any season, near any city or town.

Now, what are the People going to do about it?

Guns are cheap.  Guns are effective.  Those poors, including those awful Italians, will kill every last songbird among us.  Those who would do that are mean.  No bird is safe from these guerrillas.

Elsewhere he says this.

With the killing of robins, larks, blackbirds and cedar birds for food, the case is quite different. No white man calling himself a sportsman ever indulges in such low pastimes as the killing of such birds for food. That burden of disgrace rests upon the negroes and poor whites of the South; but at the same time, it is a shame that respectable white men sitting in state legislatures should deliberately enact laws permitting such disgraceful practices, or permit such disgraceful and ungentlemanly laws to remain in force!

Depression era poverty and starvation not withstanding, white men everywhere should be appalled at the idea that the poors are killing birds for food.  No self-respecting person would do that, at least, no one who calls himself a sportsman.

Elsewhere, this prediction shows the utter stupidity of most of the document.

At this date deer hunting is not permitted at any time in Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas,—where there are no wild deer; nor in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Tennessee or Kentucky. The long close seasons in Massachusetts, Connecticut and southern New York have caused a great migration of deer into those once-depopulated regions,—in fact, right down to tide-water.

Today, trophy bucks are routinely hunted in many of those states, because modern game management techniques managed by the states (not the federal government) are smarter than the author of this ridiculous screed.

Finally, he doesn’t like semiautomatic firearms of any sort and recommends their outlaw.

The sole and dominant thought of many gunmakers is to make the very deadliest guns that human skill can invent, sell them as fast as possible, and declare dividends on their stock. The Remington, Winchester, Marlin, Stevens and Union Companies are engaged in a mad race to see who can turn out the deadliest guns, and the most of them. On the market to-day there are five pump-guns, that fire six shots each, in about six seconds, without removal from the shoulder, by the quick sliding of a sleeve under the barrel, that ejects the empty shell and inserts a loaded one. There are two automatics that fire five shots each in five seconds or less, by five pulls on the trigger! The autoloading gun is reloaded and cocked again wholly by its own recoil. Now, if these are not machine guns, what are they?

His “model law” includes these words.

It shall be unlawful to use in hunting or shooting birds or animals of any kind, any automatic or repeating shot gun or pump gun, or any shot-gun holding more than two cartridges at one time, or that may be fired more than twice without removal from the shoulder for reloading.

Ah, the venerable over-under, still a very nice option for bird hunting, but in his world, the only permitted weapon for such pastimes.

You get the main points being made here.  The NFA and GCA didn’t outlaw machine guns, they just capped the number in circulation and ran their price up to where only the monied can purchase them.  You see, the poors don’t deserve them, any more than they deserve to feed their families by shooting the “songbirds.”  Men of good name and admirable and fine upbringing don’t do things like that in the hunting clubs.

This sort of rejection of modern firearms has carried through until recently with the likes of Jim Zumbo and David Petzal, who wanted to outlaw the use of the AR platform for hunting.  Never mind that in some cases it’s the best option (hogs are resilient animals and need more than a single shot to bring them down if you want to save meat).

So, while powerful men still want you to believe that they are in a war on crime, there are undercurrents which have been with us a long time concerning money, power and connections, that have guided decisions in this area of law.

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.

As seen on reddit, a layman’s explanation.

In 1934, rich people decided that they didn’t like poor people sneaking onto their land to hunt game, which was happening a lot because there was this economic thing called the “Great Depression” and poor people were “starving”.

So they called up a bunch of their pet congresscritters, and ordered a custom made law called the National Firearms Act of 1934.

This placed a $200 dollar tax on rifles with a barrel shorter than 16″ or an overall length less than 26″, shotguns with a barrel shorter than 18″ or an overall length less than 26″, and firearm sound suppressors of any kind. This ensured that those nasty poor people couldn’t afford guns which they might smuggle onto rich people’s land to hunt rich people’s deer, or suppressors that might prevent them from getting caught in the act.

Nowdays, $200 isn’t a whole lot of money, but the law is being exploited in a new way to restrict access. You see, this tax gets you a “tax stamp”, without which possession of the firearm is a felony. But the law doesn’t put any upper limit on the wait before the paperwork gets approved. So these papers are processed by one elderly guy named Frank, whose eyesight isn’t so good any more, and a typical application takes six months to two years to come back.

Naturally, modern folks who own guns aren’t too keen on this, but modern folks who hate guns have their pet congresscritters who are dead set against repealing any law that makes firearms ownership inconvenient, even if it makes no sense at all. Also, there is a whole three-letter agency devoted to enforcing this thing, and they don’t want to lose their jobs, so they have plenty of interesting and highly inventive arguments about how this is critical to the future of the nation, and how everyone died multiple times every week before 1934 because we didn’t have this.

So people looked into ways to do normal things while in compliance with the letter of the law.

So, the thing that looks like a stock on that thing that looks like a rifle is technically an arm brace, which makes that thing technically a pistol, which makes the National Firearms Act technically not apply to it. Now, you could say that this is a loophole which complies with the letter of the law while totally ignoring its spirit, but you could also say that the law has no spirit, and is nothing but a big technicality designed to f*** with people from the very beginning.

But however we got here, the fact remains that the thing in the photo is perfectly legal as it is, but with a slightly different stock it’ll get you a decade in the federal penitentiary.

This is why gun owners get kind of shirty about this kind of thing.

This is the same reason why some of the gun community – including the NRA – will never support repeal of the NFA, GCA and the Hughes Amendment.

Too many people have too much money invested in Class 3 weapons.  Suppose you spend $25,000 on a Class 3 weapon, or several of them, and someone comes along and tells you that your investment will tank in the near future and your guns will be worth no more than a used gun of that make and model within a single day.

Would you support it, looking at it only from the perspective of money?  The better question is what, other than a true commitment to the RKBA under God, would make you support it?

Dave Hardy at Of Arms and the Law links a very in depth and insightful commentary and analysis of the National Firearms Act (NFA).  Dave comments concerning SBRs.

In 1934, they were treated as gangster weapons, although I don’t ever recall hearing of gangsters using them. They tended to have their fights at pistol or shotgun range, not at 100+ yards. Originally the minimum barrel length was 18″; then the government discovered it had sold millions of M-1 carbines as surplus, and they had 16.5″ barrels. So the minimum length was reduced to 16″. Which did a nice job of showing how arbitrary it was.

If you follow the link you’ll get to the scholarly paper (PDF), and I highly recommend it to you.  It would be nice if my readers would tackle this document and make some salient points.  There are a lot of observations I could make but just don’t have the time or energy.

One thing I will observe is that on PDF pages 500 and 521, it’s noted that a “pistol” is defined as follows.

[A] weapon originally designed, made, and intended to fire a projectile (bullet) from one or more barrels when held in one hand, and having (a) a chamber(s) as an integral part(s) of, or permanently aligned with, the bore(s); and (b) a short stock designed to be gripped by one hand and at an angle to and extending below the line of the bore(s).

While some shooting instructors may invoke off-hand or one-handed shooting as a small part of their efforts because of possible hand-to-hand combat situations, reaching for reloads, attempting to keep an attacker from taking the slide out of battery, or other reasons, this is usually what we might call “beyond design basis.”

No instructor in his right mind today would actually teach that it’s appropriate or preferable to shoot a pistol or revolver with a single hand.  That’s how much the science has evolved since passage of the NFA.

It’s an old, antiquated, worthless, useless, tangled, self-contradictory, laughable abomination, and the more the Congress and Senate (and by extension, the ATF) hang on to this ridiculous document, the more absurd they look.

As usual, reader remarks concerning the study are welcome.

David Kopel:

In the early 20th century, the most influential advocate for banning many firearms and accessories was William T. Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoo. Using the resources of the Bronx Zoo and others for conservation, Hornaday helped save the American bison from extinction.

Hornaday’s 1913 book, “Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation,” warned that over-hunting was wiping out American wildlife. According to Hornaday, one problem was that modern guns were too accurate. Also, hunters now had better scopes and binoculars. In Wyoming, hunters were using silencers so one shot didn’t frighten away other game.

Even worse, in Hornaday’s view, was who was hunting. Namely, lower-class Americans and immigrants. He urged new laws to “prohibit the use of firearms by any naturalized alien from southern Europe until after a 10-years’ residence in America.” Wildlife was vanishing because “the Italians are spreading, spreading, spreading. If you are without them to-day, to-morrow they will be around you. Meet them at the threshold with drastic laws, thoroughly enforced.”

In the South, Hornaday argued, the problem was hunting by “poor white trash” and blacks. In an earlier time, black Americans “were too poor to own guns.” But “the time came when . . . single-shot breech-loading guns went down to five dollars a piece. The negro had money now, and the merchants . . . sold him the guns, a gun for every black idler, man and boy, in all the South.” Hornaday favored an Alabama proposal for an annual tax of at least $5 a year on every firearm, to prevent poor people from owning inexpensive guns.

Hornaday argued that all pump-action guns should be banned, as should all semi-automatics and all “silencers.” Some of Hornaday’s proposals did become law, in attenuated form. For example, states did not ban hunting by immigrant citizens, but they did enact laws against hunting or firearms possession by legal resident aliens. North Carolina enacted a statute (later repealed) that required a license for purchasing a pump action gun. (These laws are described in my article in the Harvard Journal on Legislation, Background Checks for Firearms Sales and Loans: Law, History, and Policy.)

The National Firearms Act of 1934. In 1934, Congress enacted the National Firearms Act, which used the tax power to set up a tax and registration system for certain arms and accessories. As enacted, the NFA applies to machine guns, short-barreled shotguns and rifles, “silencers,” grenades, mortars and various other devices.

Kopel has done a very nice job of outlining the history and technology of suppressors.  I would never actually recommend that someone visit The Washington Post and push traffic their direction except for The Volokh Conspiracy when writing about gun rights.  But this one is so well done it’s worth it.

Prior: Revisiting The National Firearms Act

Called silencers or “mufflers” in the deliberations on the NFA, a redditor has done good work trying to find why suppressors were included in the NFA.  As we’ve noted the discussions waxed emotional and did in fact mention them as covered under the NFA, but again, no reason is given.

It appears that the reason for the inclusion of silencers in the National Firearms Act of 1934 is completely unknown to the official record. The NFA was cooked up in the Department of Justice and advocated for by Hon. Homer S. Cummings, Attorney General of the United States and (especially) Hon. Joseph B. Keenan Assistant Attorney General, Department of Justice. I have been unable to find any credible source outlining the reason silencers were included in the NFA, and this knowledge likely died with Cummings, Keenan, and their staff. If anyone can point me to a credible source, I’d love to see it.

And of course, no reason will be forthcoming.  The redditor also notes that the NRA supported the NFA.  How sad.

This commentary caused me to revisit the National Firearms Act (hereafter, NFA).  Perhaps there are better versions of this discussion (perhaps someone can find a PDF of the deliberations), but here is a rendering of the deliberations of the Congress on the NFA.

One of the most stark and eyebrow raising parts comes up front.  It is the testimony of Homer S. Cummings, then Attorney General of the United States.

Here are some of his statements.

“The situation has become exceedingly serious … there are more people in the underworld today armed with deadly weapons, in fact, twice as many, as there are in the Army and Navy of the United States combined.  In other words, roughly speaking, there are at least 500,000 of these people who are warring against society and who carrying about with them or have available at hand, weapons of the most deadly character.”

” … defines firearms to mean pistol, revolver, a shotgun having a barrel less than 16 inches in length.”

” … it defines a machine gun as any weapon designed to shoot automatically, or semiautomatically, 12 or more shots without reloading.”

This is the first draft of the NFA on which he is testifying.  Note that all handguns, including revolvers, and all semi-automatic rifles, were included in the first draft of the NFA.

For that matter, so was body armor, what he called “bullet-proof vests.”

But he waxes to the most earnest and emotional part thereafter when asked how laws were going to effect change in those who already had these weapons.

“I racked my brain to try to find some simple and effective manner of those already armed.”

His solution if you care to read it is to tax them, trace them and make interstate commerce and travel with these NFA items illegal.

And thus we know that his entire testimony is complete and unmitigated bullshit.  He begins by whipping up the terror.  Half a million.  Again, half a million of these nefarious workers of evil who have no compunction about killing or savagery currently have access to machine guns (which he defines as semi-automatic rifles) and pistols.  Not only that, he points out upon questioning that these are half a million people, not weapons.  Each person may have a dozen or more weapons.  Seriously,  read it for yourself.  That’s six million machine guns in the hands of cold blooded killers who have no conscience and a ready-made organization.  More, mind you, than the Army and Navy combined.

And yet, making interstate commerce in those weapons and travel across state lines illegal is supposed to work as an effective deterrent to the crimes they perpetrate.  Realistically, half a million machine gun toting cold blooded killers could have taken over the government in a day, and yet Cummings is advocating his law as an effective means to hold them at bay.

This law will go down as an abomination and obscenity, and in fact it already has.  The testimony was full of lies, the law was intended to disarm peaceable men, and the use of terror was an emotional ploy on stolid Congressmen, or perhaps those who knew and played along in the disarming of the public.

The NFA is a wicked testimony to the depravity of mankind.  It’s still the holy grail for gun controllers today who want to restrict semi-automatic weapons, pistols, barrel lengths and magazine capacity.  God will not bless a country with a history of controlling people in such a manner, and this law deserves our utmost disapprobation.  We should not and do not recognize its legitimacy.