The NFA was intended to be a means of crime control.
Some of us believe otherwise...
Some of us believe that the NFA 34 was a "jobs" bill for all those T-men who suddenly found that they had nothing to enforce with the repeal of Prohibition.
It was the middle of the Depression, and adding FEDERAL AGENTS to the soup lines would have done even MORE damage to people's confidence, not to mention the strong tendency of bureaucracies to protect their own, when possible.
SO, you make a TAX law, (and this is an important part in understanding the law, then, and how it is different now), and you TAX a TINY segment of gun owners. Remember, at the time, there was NO organized resistance to gun control laws, as there really weren't any (national) till now. So, the people you are now taxing, oppressively, have NO POLITICAL VOICE.
Your test case is a couple of hillbilly moonshiners, who, when busted, weren't making moonshine, but did have a sawed off shotgun that hadn't been registered and had the tax paid. These guys are dirt poor, and couldn't have paid the tax anyway, particularly a $200 tax on a $5 shotgun.
Their defense (which was a sympathetic lawyer who worked pro bono on the case) was that the gun was a militia arm, and as such, should be exempt from the tax, 2nd Amendment, shall not be infringed, and all that.
The original trial judge agreed, ruled for the defense. The Fed appealed, all the way to the Supreme Court. When the case finally got there, things had changed with the defendants, and the lawyer, and literally, no one showed up to defend against the govt's case.
SO, the Supreme court essentially said "we have been shown no evidence" to refute the govt case, and ruled in favor of the Fed. And the NFA 34 has been the legal law of the land, ever since.
Now, I mentioned earlier how this was a TAX law. And it was enforced as a tax law, for over 30 years. The penalties of the law were for not paying the TAX, not for merely possessing the regulated arms.
If you were found with an unregistered, untaxed NFA item, you had two choices, you COULD go to court and fight it, (virtually a guaranteed loss, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling) and if you lost the penalties would apply.
OR, you could register the item, pay the tax, and keep it, no harm, no foul. The Fed allowed this, even encouraged it.
Until the late 1960s. (I want to say 68, but without looking it up, am unsure the exact year) The enforcement of the law changed. The Fed offered an amnesty period (6 months, I think) where you could register and pay the tax for any NFA items, without penalty. After that, if caught, you would be charged.
While there had been no change in the wording of the 34 law, the change in enforcement policies was huge. After the change, you could still register the gun and pay the tax but doing so did not get charges dropped. The effective change was that, instead of being punished for not paying the tax, you were punished for possession of an untaxed item, and faced charges whether you subsequently paid the tax, or not.
In 86, the Hughes amendment to the FOPA ended our ability add machineguns to the registry. ONLY machineguns that had previously been registered were allowed to be registered, and sold to the public.
SO, new made machine guns, and newly discovered older guns could NOT be legally registered for civilian ownership. Only the military, law enforcement organizations, and the licensed dealers who did business with them could have "post 86" machineguns. And that is still the situation today.
(If I've gotten any significant details wrong, please, correct me
)
