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Post by Admin on Sept 2, 2019 10:28:28 GMT
National Firearms Act of 1934: Signed Into Law June 26, 1934
Signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the National Firearms Act, Public Law 73-474, sought to control specifically the types of weapons typically involved in organized crime and violent gangland incidents: automatic weapons like machine guns and easily concealed but wide-impact, short-barrel firearms, such as sawed-off shotguns, as well as mufflers and silencers. Rather than banning them, the act instead placed a financial premium on them and allowed tracking of them by requiring that:
Importers, manufacturers and dealers register and pay an annual tax: $500 for importers and manufacturers, $300 for pawnbrokers and $200 for dealers.
Transferors pay a $200 tax per transaction.
Intended recipients complete an application and submit identification, including fingerprints and a photograph.
Importers, manufacturers and dealers maintain records of all transactions.
All transfers as well as all previously owned firearms be registered, including the firearm’s identifying marks; the owner’s name, address and place of employment; and where the gun was to be kept.
Any violation of the act be subject to a $2,000 fine and up to five years in prison.
The National Firearms Act has not been updated since, and importers, manufacturers, dealers and buyers still pay the same fees. Accounting for inflation, the $200 transaction tax would now be the equivalent of more than $3,500, and the $2,000 fine would be more than $35,000.
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Post by bazooka on Sept 5, 2019 14:21:39 GMT
What is the National Firearms Act?
 The 1934 law that regulates many of the cooler items in the gun world, the National Firearms Act and its associated taxes raises many questions. Here are some answers.
How did the NFA make it into law?
Introduced into the 73rd Congress on May 28, 1934, as H.R. 9741 by U.S. Rep. Robert “Bob” Doughton, a North Carolina Democrat, the legislation sailed through Capitol Hill in less than a month. For historical perspective, the country was amid the Great Depression and lawmakers in the same Democrat-controlled Congress also sped the Securities Act, which established the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the National Industrial Recovery Act, which established the Public Works Administration, to the waiting hands of President Franklin Roosevelt for signature. The measure passed both chambers on a voice vote, with no record of which lawmakers approved it.
The bill that made it through Congress was watered down compared to other proposals at the time, such as HR 9066. Introduced by U.S. Rep. Hatton Sumners, D-TX, H.R. 9066 contained most of the same regulations and restrictions as the NFA but also targeted handguns and added a $5,000 yearly tax on firearm makers and importers. When adjusted for inflation, that figure would approach $100,000 today.
What does the NFA regulate?
While the new law did not outright ban the items under its control, it did require that shotguns and rifles with barrels less than 18 or 16 inches respectively in length, machine guns, firearm “mufflers and silencers” and firearms such as cane guns described as “any other weapons” be regulated and a tax established that was due whenever the device was made or transferred. Likewise, those who produced such items would have to pay a special occupational tax. The base price for most of these taxes was set at $200 per item, per transfer. This was the equivalent of about $3,800 in 2019 dollars.
As noted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which was originally part of the IRS until 1972, “The $200 making and transfer taxes on most NFA firearms were considered quite severe and adequate to carry out Congress’ purpose to discourage or eliminate transactions in these firearms.”
The amount of revenue paid into the U.S. Treasury has shifted over the years as, in general, the amount of tax has remained the same. In 1938, just $5,000 was collected. By 1984, $1.2 million was paid. In 2017, the ATF noted that just over $29 million was collected.
The NFA today
Today, the NFA controls the making and transfer of short-barreled rifles (SBR), short-barreled shotguns (SBS), silencers/suppressors, machine guns, AOWs, and destructive devices — with the latter something of a “catch-all” that includes everything from live grenades to anti-tank guns. Registration and tracking of such items are included in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record, or NFRTR.
As of February 2018, over 5.5 million items were carried on the record:
AOW 60,706
Destructive Devices 2,818,528
Machine guns 638,260
Short Barreled Rifles 345,323
Short Barreled Shotguns 149,866
Suppressors 1,489,791
Has the NFA been challenged?
As with many controversial laws, the NFA has been the target of numerous legal challenges over its existence. This included the 1937 Sonzinsky case before the Supreme Court, which upheld the law as a valid exercise of the taxing power of Congress. More recently, the office of the current Solicitor General of the United States, Noel Francisco, used Sonzinsky in defense of the NFA in a challenge to the nation’s highest court in the case of a Kansas man found guilty of an NFA violation.
Jeremy Kettler in 2017 was found guilty of violating federal laws concerning the manufacturing and selling of suppressors and was given a year’s probation on a single count of possession of an unregistered NFA item. With the conviction upheld on appeal to the 10th U.S. Circuit last October. Aided by gun rights groups, Kettler appealed his case to the Supreme Court in January, arguing that the NFA is unconstitutional and that it is a money-losing tax that produces no effective revenue for the government while effectively criminalizing the devices it controls.
Francisco’s office in May told the court that Kettler’s petition should be denied, saying that it “lacked merit.” The Supreme Court declined to take up Kettler’s petition on June 10.
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Post by oldhippy on Sept 5, 2019 14:24:28 GMT
The cowards on the Court again failed to tackle this unconstitutional law (which had been established as unconstitutional by the 1804 Marbury Vs. Madison case, the 1943 Murdock Vs. Pennsylvania case, and the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution (banning requirement of paying a tax on the right to vote) The San Francisco appeals court considers that ordinary citizens "lack standing" to file suits about guns and other subjects, because they are not members of any organized militia (for 2A related issues), even though the Supreme Court, and many if not most of the remaining appeals courts have repeatedly established that a person's membership in an "organized militia group" like the National Guard, the Naval Militia, and so on, is not necessary for a citizen to possess the inalienable right to keep and bear arms (since under Title 10 US Code section 311, everyone who is not a member of the Guard or the Naval Militia is a member of the "unorganized militia" and is expected to (as the 8-0 [unanimous] decision on the NFA in 1939's US Vs. Miller case put it, appear at a moment's notice armed with their personally owned weapons (and of course ammunition) of the kind in common use at the time--which they cannot do if they are prohibited by an unconstitutional law from owning.
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Post by magnum on Sept 5, 2019 14:27:32 GMT
The 1939 Murdock Vs. Pennsylvania case in which the state of Pennsylvania taxed the distribution of a free tract from (IIRC) the Jehovah's Witnesses, rightly stated that to tax a right was to destroy a right. This NFA transfer tax was among the first in a long series of anti-gun laws that made it more expensive to own certain firearms (and in the NFA, accessories) so that, as the Dems in both houses stated during what little debate occurred that the act was supposed to keep Italian, Sicilian and [n-word (the actual word)] gangsters" from getting the guns. Of course it failed in that stated purpose, but succeeded in making it harder and more expensive for people who would never commit a crime to get these objects and use them lawfully, while not really affecting the criminal's ability to get them and use them in illegal acts. As the late Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Roy Innis, once stated (about heavily taxing relatively inexpensive handguns known as Saturday Night Specials) : "To make inexpensive guns impossible to get is to say that you're putting a money test on getting a gun. It's racism in its worst form." This was its entire real purpose, an extension of the black codes and other Jim Crow type laws that prohibited (mostly) blacks from exercising their constitutionally protected rights. (and that was true even in northern states like Michigan, Minnesota, California, New York, and so on).
The Supreme Court established the stare decisis for overturning this entire law in the 1804 Marbury Vs. Madison decision written (IIRC) by then Chief Justice John Marshall, where he stated that any law [and by extension, ruling by any other federal agency, including the Supreme Court] that was "repugnant to the Constitution" was invalid as soon as it was passed or stated, and could not be enforced
The Democrat party continues this racist trend in recent times, in refusing to repeal the NFA in its entirely, and in passing additional laws (Gun Control Act of 1968, the Hughes Amendment to the Firearms Owners' Protection Act, The 1994 Clinton/Feinstein "Assault Weapon ban, the Lautenberg amendment, which stated that anyone who had EVER been convicted on the (then) misdemeanor charge of spousal abuse or child abuse could be denied the ability to purchase a gun from a Federal Firearms License holder, the "gun free zone" laws passed by Congress and many state legislatures, and so on. Anyone who votes for Democrats is racist.
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