The topic of gun control has been a divisive issue since the birth of the United States’s Bill of Rights in 1791, and it has caused fierce debate among legal scholars and laymen alike and that debate is still ongoing and evolving after centuries. The latest example of trying to set a new precedent on the issue can be observed in the case The New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Kevin P. Bruen, where the petitioners try to make the claim that laws restricting a citizen’s right to carry a firearm outside of one’s home for self-defense purposes are against their Second Amendment rights.
All the disagreement and legal ambiguity of gun regulation seems to stem from one source: The Second Amendment of the Constitution. The Amendment states that “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” Depending on your interpretation, this either means the citizens’ individual right to bear arms in case of a threat to their personal safety and property or alternatively, the states’ collective right to defend themselves against the tyranny of the federal government and other outside forces. For most of the Amendment’s history, the latter has been the dominant interpretation. However, recent cases brought to the Supreme Court have challenged the status quo, no doubt partly due to the conservative leaning judges appointed to the court who tend to rule in favor of these precedent-shifting petitions.
Historically, the legislative action has tilted towards further restrictions to gun ownership and more broadly the firearm market as a whole. In the 1930s Congress passed the first two federal laws to regulate the firearm market in the States. The first one, called the National Firearms Act (NFA) was designed to reduce crime and was passed in 1934 and imposed a tax on the manufacturing, transporting and selling of some particular firearms. The second law, called the Federal Firearms Act (FFA) was passed in 1938 and mandated manufacturers and dealers among others to have a federal firearms license. The FFA also restricted access of convicted felons and the mentally ill to obtain firearms.
The NFA and FFA were followed by multiple laws by Congress to further limit the access to firearms in the coming decades. These restrictions included, among other things, banning weapons of ”no sporting purpose”, banning handguns for citizens under 21 years old and requiring gun dealers to perform background checks on clients. There was one law however, that actually loosened the regulation even before the current shift in the Overton window of gun regulation. Called the Firearm Owners Protection Act, it prohibited a national registry of gun dealer records, made it possible to sell firearms at so called ”gun shows” and permitted the sales of ammunition without a license.
The Lawslingers