National Firearms Act - Background

Background

The purpose of the NFA was to regulate what were considered "gangster weapons" such as machine guns and short barreled shotguns. Then U.S. Attorney General Homer S. Cummings recognized that firearms could not be banned outright under the Second Amendment, so he proposed restrictive regulation in the form of an expensive tax and Federal registration. Originally, pistols and revolvers were to be regulated as strictly as machine guns; towards that end, cutting down a rifle or shotgun to circumvent the handgun restrictions by making a concealable weapon was taxed as strictly as a machine gun.

Conventional pistols and revolvers were ultimately excluded from the Act before passage, but other concealable firearms were not: the language as originally enacted defined an NFA "firearm" as:

A shotgun or rifle having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length or any other weapon, other than a pistol or revolver, from which a shot is discharged by an explosive if such weapon is capable of being concealed on the person, or a machinegun, and includes a muffler or silencer for any firearm whether or not such a firearm is included in the foregoing definition.

Under the original Act, NFA "firearms" were machine guns, short-barreled rifles (SBR), short-barreled shotguns (SBS), any other weapons (AOW or concealable weapons other than pistol or revolver) and silencers for any type of firearm NFA or non-NFA. Minimum barrel length was soon amended to 16 inches for rimfire rifles and by 1960 had been amended to 16 inches for centerfire rifles as well. In recent years several SBRs, Winchester and Marlin "trapper" rifles made before 1934 with 14 or 15 inch barrels, were removed from the NFA (Title II), although they are still subject to Gun Control Act of 1968 (Title I).

In 1938 Congress recognized that the Marble Game Getter, a short .22/.410 sporting firearm, had "legitimate use" and did not deserve the stigma of "gangster weapon" and reduced the $200 tax to one dollar for the Game Getter. In 1960 Congress changed the transfer tax for all "any other weapon" (AOW) category to $5. The transfer tax for machine guns, silencers, SBR and SBS remained at $200.

The United States Supreme Court, in deciding the case of Haynes v. United States in favor of the defendant, effectively gutted the National Firearms Act of 1934. As one could possess an NFA firearm and choose not to register it, and not face prosecution due to Fifth Amendment protections, the Act was unenforceable. To deal with this, Congress rewrote the Act to make registration of existing firearms impossible except by the government (previously, an existing firearm could be registered by any citizen). In addition to fixing the defect identified in Haynes, the revision tightened definitions of the firearms regulated by the Act, as well as incorporating a new category of firearm, the Destructive Device, which was first regulated in the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. This revision is known as the National Firearms Act of 1968 to differentiate it from the NFA of 1934, which is a different (and now void) law.

NFA categories have been modified by laws passed by Congress, rulings by the Department of the Treasury and regulations promulgated by the enforcement agency assigned to firearms known as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives or BATFE.