Bryan Miller was thankful yesterday for the federal restrictions on machine guns. As one commenter pointed out:
Bryan Miller is right — the 1934 law strictly regulating machine guns has been effective, resulting in almost nonexistent cases of misuse by their legal owners. So gun control groups are satisfied about that, right?
WRONG — most gun control groups favor banning ownership of machine guns from those who now own them legally and without misuse.
And that is why we we’re obstinate in opposing them. The federal machine gun regulations are actually very instructive. For 50 years you had, by any gun control advocate’s standards, a successful program of licensing (in the form of a tax stamp) and registration, that resulted in very few crimes from legally possessed machine guns — and yet in 1986, they banned them anyway.