A little known law, passed concurrently with the Gun Control Act of 1968, offers the Trump administration a powerful lever…
When the Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed, the Congress concurrently passed a bill to allow an amnesty for people who had unregistered NFA items. No fingerprints or tax was required. Fill out a paper form and send it in, and your NFA item was registered. The initial amnesty was for 30 days in 1968, from October 2nd to November 1st. The law contained a provision for further amnesties at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury. They only needed to be announced beforehand in the Federal Register…
The Hearing Protection Act changes the regulation of silencers from being treated the same as machine guns to being treated like rifles or shotguns.
Short barreled rifles or shotguns should be eliminated as a special class. Instead, handguns should be re-defined as any firearm that is designed to be fired in a configuration shorter than 26 inches. 26 inches is the current standard for short barreled rifles and shotguns.
The ban on highly regulated citizen ownership of machine guns made after 1986 should be repealed.
The Amnesty law offers the lever to accomplish these reforms.
If the Democrats want to filibuster the Hearing Protection act, offer a 90 day amnesty on the registration of silencers for the NFA. No tax, no fingerprints, just fill out a form and send it in. If the Democrats refuse to relent, rinse, and repeat. Pound the new media and twitter with the insanity of the current law. 100 million gun owners will appreciate Donald Trump as a defender of the Second Amendment.
The same thing can be done for reform of the insane short barreled rifle and shotgun provisions.
The same can be done for the repeal of the 1986 ban on manufacture or licensing of machine guns under the NFA.
Wow, brand new, freshly manufactured post-NFA-86 machineguns, just in time for the Apocalypse. I feel like it is Christmas already. Imagine what that will do to the economics of the firearms sector, to say nothing about the shortening of savage lifespans.
It would fit with Trump’s bold style, if he were to overhaul the entire Federal Firearms legal framework into a uniform, sensible, more easily enforced body of law that was uniform between states, and protected the law abiding citizen’s right to bear arms in self defense.
That today, restrictions are allowed to be passed that affect all states and the state is powerless to modify them, while other further restrictions are allowed on a state by state basis is contradictory. Either states are different enough from each other to justify handing the entirety of firearms laws themselves according to each state’s unique tastes, or states occupy uniform enough positions that the Federal government can standardize all laws across the nation. And that ignores all of the other silliness.
The idea that a small handgrip on the front of a handgun makes it into an NFA weapon is ridiculous. So too is that if a handgun is propped in some fashion against the body it becomes a short barreled rifle and NFA controlled as well is ridiculous.
If Trump does this and adds National Concealed Carry, I am not sure there would be anything about federal firearms law I would be able to complain about. This is an amazing time we are heading into.
