A History of Gun Control in America

By Harold Gene Holdridge III

June 2, 2020

Assault weapons bans, high-capacity magazine bans, and restrictions on who can buy firearms. Major gun control is often thought of as a modern development in the American political drama. We like to think back to how our Founding Fathers were undoubtably pro-gun, even going to war with the British to protect just the one of many rights. However, almost as soon as we gained our independence from our tyrannical predecessors, the federal and state governments went to work limiting who could own what, slowly restricting our freedoms in the name of security more and more, until we land in the position we see ourselves today.

The first restrictions on rights should be obvious, as it coincides with America’s mortal sin, slavery. During the 19th century, the states were the primary restrictors of our right to bear arms, banning not only slaves, but Free Blacks and indentured servants from owning firearms. Some states allowed Free Blacks to go through a licensing process, but these were short-lived. Restrictions only increased after Nat Turner’s Rebellion, where states like Virginia banned Free Blacks from the ability “to keep or carry any firelock of any kind, military weapon, or any powder or lead”. After the Civil War, African-American’s were still restricted by Jim Crow laws, but the restrictions spread. Our current idea of the “Old West” is a wild time where every cowboy had a gun, just in case a shootout was going to occur. This, however, is also over blown. Many towns required you to leave your guns with the sheriff as you came into town. Even Texas, long thought of as the bastion of guns in America, outright banned citizens from open or concealed carrying a pistol in public in 1871.

The true beginning of major federal gun control was in the wake of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. Seven gangsters were murdered, beginning a debate that lasted five years till a law that is still around to this day. The bane of the firearms community, the National Firearms Act (NFA). The law imposed a $200 tax stamp, approximately $2,998.70 today, on the creation and transfer of short-barreled shotguns and rifles, fully automatic weapons, and some firearm accessories like suppressors. This leads to the Federal Firearms Act of 1938, which created the Federal Firearms License (FFL), required for people who sold firearms. This law also banned sellers from selling firearms to felons and forced them to maintain records of who they sold firearms to. The 60’s led to even more restriction following the assassinations of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, and Robert Kennedy. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson (the bane of my alma mater, Texas State University) signed the Gun Control Act of 1968. The GCA’s main function was to ban the transfer and sale of firearms, unless the sale was among licensed dealers. The GCA also vastly increased the number of people prohibited from owning firearms, such as those with misdemeanor convictions of domestic violence.

The “modern era” saw even further restriction, beginning with Bill Clinton and the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act of 1993. This required a five-day waiting period for a licensed dealer to sell a firearm to an unlicensed person in a state without an alternate background check system, though this feature was replaced by the instant background check system later. This was followed by the Federal Assault Weapons Ban section of the Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act of 1994. The law banned nineteen semi-automatic weapons due to “military features”. The law, thankfully, expired in 2004 and was not renewed.

Since the 90’s we have not seen any major gun control legislation come through the federal pipeline, but the arguments continue forwards. Every democratic candidate has a plan to ban “semi-automatic assault weapons”. They all have grand ideas to end gun violence, while being blind to the fact that their laws have prevented nothing. Even President Trump is not explicitly pro-gun, signing an executive order banning bump-stocks and seeming willing to sign a “red flag law”, not only trampling on the 2nd Amendment, but the 4th as well. Each of these laws do nothing, but they remind me of a quote. “A scary black gun hardly functions differently from a more traditional wooden firearm; it simply looks better doing it”.