Repeal These Three Stupid Gun Laws

Often times laws are rushed into existence without adequate care or deliberation to solve a temporary problem, only to prove itself to be both oppressive and archaic as time marches on.

That headlong rush towards poorly-formed permanent solutions for temporary problems has gotten far worse in recent decades as we’ve become a society who demands instant solutions, and who has allowed the federal government to become bloated, large and arrogant.

Nowhere is that more evident than with federal gun laws.

For the first 227 years of the United States, from the time the Constitution was ratified in 1789 until 1934, Congress respected the view of the Founding Fathers who held quite seriously that the federal government was prohibited from passing any laws regarding firearms whatsoever.

The power of the sword, say the minority…, is in the hands of Congress. My friends and countrymen, it is not so, for The powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from sixteen to sixty. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress has no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every terrible implement of the soldier are the birthright of Americans.

— Founding Father Tench Cox, Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788
The Founders wanted to ensure that citizens would always be armed with weapons of contemporary military utility to keep both foreign enemies and domestic despots in check.

That common sense understanding that “shall not be infringed” meant precisely what it said lasted until an arrogant progressives forced the 18th Amendment down the throats of the American people, declaring the production, transport, and sale of alcohol to be illegal.

As demand for alcohol beverages remained high despite the law, organized crime families developed to fill the demand, and the wars they fought over territories, over illegal breweries, in hijackings,, etc were legendary. These gang wars and the attempted assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 led progressives—yes, the same people who created the problem in the first place—to place a punitive tax and registration requirement on all handguns, short-barrel rifles (SBRs), Short-barrelled shotguns (SBSs), as well as machine guns, and “destructive devices.” Silencers were thrown into the bill because of concerns that silencer-equipped poachers would decimate wild animal populations as Americans starved through the Great Depression.