Weapons of War on America’s Streets

The Hidden History of Guns and the 2nd Amendment

How America became awash in guns, mass shootings, and child murders in our schools. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Chapter 25

Weapons of War on America’s Streets 

Yes, people pull the trigger—but guns are the instrument of death. Gun control is necessary, and delay means more death and horror. 

—Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer

America has a deep and complex problem with guns, which simultaneously draws on the history of genocide and slavery, the ongoing and widespread hatred and/or fear of people of color by a significant portion of America’s white population, and the interconnection of “conservative” media like Fox and right-wing talk radio. 

There are multiple strategies to dial back gun violence, most drawing on the experience of other nations. The key to all of them is to reduce the overall number of guns in circulation; numerous studies show that there is a clear and simple association between the number of guns in circulation and the frequency and severity of gun violence. 

As David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Center, told the New York Times’ Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Generally, if you live in a civilized society, more guns means more death. There is no evidence that having more guns reduces crime. None at all.”¹ 

Similarly, when the new mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, banned carrying guns in cars or in public in 2010, the homicide rate in the city dropped by 50 percent.² 

Given both the anecdotal evidence of the radical drop in deaths and crime in country after country that make it harder to buy and own guns, and the multiple scientific studies that back up that observation, it appears that two simple changes to US law—both based in other laws that Americans already know well and like, could solve most of America’s gun-violence problem. They are: 

1. Treat all semiautomatic weapons in a similar way under the same laws as fully automatic weapons. 

2. Regulate gun ownership and usage the same way America regulates car ownership and usage. 

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Chapter 26

Semiautomatic Weapons

Semi-automatics have only two purposes. One is so owners can take them to the shooting range once in awhile, yell yeehaw, and get all horny at the rapid fire and the burning vapor spurting from the end of the barrel. Their other use—their only other use—is to kill people.

—Stephen King, Guns

Back in the Prohibition era, before and during the time John Dillinger and friends were shooting up American cities from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, the National Rifle Association approved of two very consequential laws that restricted gun ownership and use. 

(The NRA didn’t become a lobbying and promotional front group for the weapons industry until the 1970s, when the Supreme Court’s Buckley v. Valeo and First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti decisions ruled that wealthy gun-manufacturing corporations could legally buy and own their very own politicians. For nearly a century prior to that, the NRA supported rational gun control.) 

The Uniform Firearms Act of 1931 in Pennsylvania was the harbinger of the federal National Firearms Act of 1934, which brought an end to the widespread legal availability of fully automatic “tommy guns,” along with, later, silencers and sawed-off shotguns. But ownership of such automatic weapons isn’t really banned—it’s just a somewhat complex process to get permission to own and use them. 

First, the applicant must find a local law enforcement officer who will vouch for him or her and perform a background check. His or her signature is the necessary first step to getting a permit to own an automatic weapon,¹ and the applicant must have an absolutely clean record, from a clean criminal record to not owing any child support to not having any past firearms violations. If someone lies about this, or applies for a permit through a “clean” third party, they and their third party could both end up in jail. 

Then the applicant must pull together two sets of fingerprints and two passport-type photos, plus the $200 “tax stamp” fee for the permit, and get all the information on the gun, including its serial number and details on its last owner. 

Finally, he or she needs to fill out an “OMB No. 1140-0014 Application for Tax Paid Transfer and Registration of Firearm” form, with such easy questions as category 14:

1. Are you under indictment or information in any court for a felony, or any other crime, for which the judge could imprison you for more than one year? 

2. Have you ever been convicted in any court for a felony, or any other crime, for which the judge could have imprisoned you for more than one year, even if you received a shorter sentence including probation? (See definition 1m) 

3. Are you a fugitive from justice? 

4. Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance? 

5. Have you ever been adjudicated as a mental defective OR have you ever been committed to a mental institution? 

6. Have you been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions? 

7. Are you subject to a court order restraining you from harassing, stalking, or threatening your child or an intimate partner or child of such partner? 

8. Have you ever been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence? 

Applicants also have to provide the government with the reason why they think it appropriate for them to have a fully automatic weapon, sawed-off shotgun, or other “destructive device”:

13. Transferee Necessity Statement: I _____________________ have a reasonable necessity to possess the machinegun, short-barreled rifle, short-barreled shotgun, or destructive device described on this application for the following reason(s) ____________________________________ and my possession of the device or weapon would be consistent with public safety (18 U.S.C. § 922(b) (4) and 27 CFR § 478.98). 

Karl Frederick, the NRA’s president back when these laws were put into place, was enthusiastic. “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” he said. “I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”

When Frederick was asked if he thought the National Firearms Act of 1934 violated a person’s Second Amendment rights, he famously said, “I have not given it any study from that point of view.”

The result of the restrictions on ownership of fully automatic weapons (and other “destructive devices”) has been that they’ve pretty much vanished as the scourge on public safety that they were in the late 1920s and early 1930s. 

Thus, it’s rare that either fully automatic weapons or the less-efficient-at-killing-lots-of-people revolvers and bolt-action rifles are used for mass murders. This is largely because the former are hard to buy/own; and for the latter, the time necessary to re-cock and reload presents victims an opportunity to stop a mass shooting. 

Remember, the only reason why the shooter who tried to kill Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, was stopped after “only” killing six people was that he had to replace his 33-shot magazine with a fresh one, and Bill Badger, a 74-year-old man standing near him (whom he’d just shot), tackled him and held him to the ground.²

Thus, as the volume of production of semiautomatic weapons has increased in the past 30 years or so, and their price has come down, the older-fashioned pistols and bolt-action rifles have been replaced by a more recent generation of semiautomatic pistols, rifles, and assault weapons. 

But if most handguns in circulation were revolvers, and most rifles were bolt- or break-action, there would be far fewer (or at least far less deadly) mass shootings. 

Revolvers typically have a cylinder that holds five to 10 rounds of ammunition, and each chamber in the cylinder must be individually loaded. While there are autoloaders and other ways to speed up the process, the gun is still largely limited, at least in an “active shooter” situation, to the rounds in its cylinder. 

With a revolver, the gun can’t even be fired until it’s cocked by pulling back the hammer or pulling hard enough on the trigger to cock the hammer. 

Revolvers are very efficient killing machines, having been in widespread use since their popularization by the Colt Company in the 1830s, but while they’re great for sport and self-defense (and were police weapons of choice until the past 30 or so years), for mass killings they can’t hold a candle to semiautomatics. 

Semiautomatic pistols are, in their modern form, a creation of the last century. They use the recoil force of a shot (some also use the exhaust gases) to load a new round into the chamber and cock the gun, all in one seamless and nearly instantaneous motion. 

As a result, semiautomatics can be fired as fast as one can pull the trigger, and the amount of trigger pressure that a revolver would require to cock the hammer is unnecessary. And because they don’t have a built-in cylinder like a revolver, the magazine in a semiautomatic that stores the ammunition (some as large as 50 shots) can be quickly replaced. 

The rifle side of the equation is largely the same: while bolt-action rifles don’t have a cylinder, they do require the shooter to pull back the bolt between shots, which ejects the spent shell, inserts a new one, and re-cocks the weapon itself. Variations on this include lever-action and pump-action rifles or shotguns, although all require action by the shooter between shots. 

Semiautomatic rifles, on the other hand, like semiautomatic pistols, use recoil or gases to reload and re-cock the weapon, so that shots can be squeezed off as fast as the shooter can pull the trigger. And because—like semiautomatic pistols—they have quickly replaceable magazines, they’re far deadlier than bolt-pump or break-action rifles. 

Since the vast majority of mass murders of the 1930s were accomplished with fully automatic weapons, tightly regulating who could buy and own them pretty much removed mass murders from the streets of America. It’s time to do the same with semiautomatic weapons, which are the new mass killers’ weapons of choice. 

All it would take would be amending the National Firearms Act to put any semiautomatic gun of any kind under the same sort of oversight and permitting necessary for fully automatic weapons.