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Silencers

The thing to remember is that the NFA (Nat'l Firearms Act of 1934) wasn't originally aimed at suppressors, or machine guns, or anything that's in it today.

Some of the folks behind it actually looked at what criminals used during the Roaring 20s, and contrary to what Hollywood tells us, it was handguns, just like it is today.

The NFA was originally a law to ban handguns, but that was when Congress still believed 'shall not be infringed' was a real thing. Since they couldn't ban handguns outright, they did an end run and tried to tax them out of existence.

The tax stamp was originally going to be $5 and $25 (although that changed around until the bills final moments), with the $5 stamp still in existence for AOW's. All the rules about short-barreled rifles and shotguns were put in place to keep people from making their own 'handguns' out of long guns.

Then, part way through the process the bill's sponsors realized that they would never get it passed. There was simply too much support for handguns, especially out West, for it to have a chance.

So they removed handguns and substituted machine guns instead, feeding off the myths built up by movies, print and radio. They set the tax at $200, which was exactly the price of a new Thompson submachinegun in those days (and a little more than a brand new Ford).

Somewhere along the line they used the same logic to lump silencers into the bill, again strictly because they were an 'assassins' weapon' according to Hollywood. Like machine guns, they were also rarely used by gangsters.

They didn't bother taking out the SBR/SBS language, even though it wasn't really relevant anymore. No one at the time really foresaw a problem with it since who would cut down a perfectly good rifle or shotgun if they could still buy a handgun?

The whole thing got passed into law, and strangely enough ended up in front of the Supreme Court on of all things, a short-barreled shotgun case.

FDR pulled a Biden and threatened to 'pack' the court with his appointees if they didn't side with the government's convoluted logic that the 2A wasn't an individual right, but a 'collective' one, although in the end the case ended up 'moo' because the person charged with having the SBS died.

Unfortunately that didn't stop it being used as precedent until Heller overturned it 70-odd years later.

However that's why we have a $200 stamp... it was the price of a Thompson in the Sears catalog in 1933.
 
Excellent post Spencer 60!
I was going to say pretty much the same thing.
When I was in the honors program as an American History major undergrad,
I did my senior thesis on the FFA and NFA of the 1930's. I had to look into the archives and microfilmed records looking at original sources as well as contemporary news reports in the media of that era.


It's true that Congress actually believed the Second Amendment meant something, and would be a barrier to many types of federal gun control if some other part of the constitution were not invoked.

Furthermore, back then they did not yet realize how the courts would let them invoke the "commerce clause" to nullify every other part of the constitution and every doctrine of separation of powers that the Framers had intended. (The 10th Amendment was killed off and buried during the 1930s.)


So, the idea of a "gun ban" had to yield to the idea of a federal "gun tax" on only certain types of guns , or accessories, and the tax was deliberately set to be prohibitively high. Congress did not want private citizens to seriously consider paying the tax and going through the burdensome registration process. They wanted us peons to just forget about it entirely.
 
Silencers/suppressors were developed for urban pest control. What they are still used for in Britain/Europe.

That use never caught on in the US where no one cared about the noise. So they became associated with gangsters from the movies, despite the fact that gangsters don't care about the noise either.

Not about silencers, but in as late as the 1970s there was a squad of Athens police who would walk the downtown streets early on Sunday morning, and pot shoot pigeons with .410 "city loads", which were low velocity .410 loads. The loads were notable because they wouldn't break the glass on second story windows and of course they were quite.

The practice ended with the PETA types showed up and starting making an issue about it.
 
Just remember silencers are not meant to protect the people. the law was passed to keep people from poaching food during the great depression. It's not a matter of whether you need to hear the gun or not it's a matter of whether you're allowed to eat or not.
 
poopdaddy said:
Just remember silencers are not meant to protect the people. the law was passed to keep people from poaching food during the great depression. It's not a matter of whether you need to hear the gun or not it's a matter of whether you're allowed to eat or not.
Click to expand...

That's one possible reason that silencers were added to the NFA. In the 1930s Hollywood hadn't made many movies about suppressors, unlike machine guns which were on everybody's mind since the carnage of WWi.

While some hunters used cans (Teddy Roosevelt was an early adopter), the Depression saw a huge increase in poaching. Most common game species were almost wiped out right off the bat, and it could very well have been hunters who pushed for their inclusion, thinking it might make poaching harder.
 
GAGunguy said:
The $200 tax stamp was actually designed as a deterrent, in 1934 when it was passed, $200 was an astronomical fee. In todays dollars its $3800.
Click to expand...

Also in 1934 that was the depths of the depression, you could buy a "working" car for $200 back then. People were probably living, not well, on $100 a month.
 
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