Welcome back, machine guns
Automatic weapons have been strictly regulated in the United States since the passage of the first National Firearms Act in 1934. Congress took action back then in response to gangland killings in places like Chicago, where a commission estimated that 729 people had been slain in crime-related violence from 1919 to 1933.
Far more people today are killed by gun violence than in the Prohibition era — more than 20,000 a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And more and more, authorities report seeing a comeback of machine guns. But this time, Congress is doing nothing about it.
Around the country, police have been seizing firearms that were manufactured as legal semiautomatic weapons but were easily converted to perform like automatic ones through the use of a cheap device known as an “auto sear.” Rather than have to pull the trigger each time to fire a round, the shooter only has to push down once. The gun keeps firing until the ammunition is spent, or the person releases the trigger, at a mind-boggling rate of 800 bullets or more per minute, according to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The devices, which can take just seconds to install, can be purchased on the internet for around $20 from overseas sellers, or made on a 3D printer. Their popularity has soared; the ATF says it saw a nearly six-fold increase in the number of converted guns seized by police departments between 2017 and 2021. That amounted to more than 5,400 such weapons during that period.
Federal law already severely restricts the sale, transfer and possession of automatic weapons, and the ATF ruled back in 1981 that possession of auto sears is the same as possession of a machine gun. Some states, including New York, also have laws banning or restricting them.
But in a nation that has seen a boom in ownership of semi-automatic firearms since Congress allowed the last assault weapons ban to expire in 2004, the problem isn’t just this small device. It’s also the fact that the guns that can be so easily converted are so widely owned and available.
But there are actions Congress could take. It could finally ban the highcapacity magazines that make it possible to kill dozens of people at a time with both semi-automatic and automatic weapons. It could require that manufacturers of semi-automatic weapons make conversion far more difficult, if not impossible. It could enact a new assault weapons ban.
And it’s Congress, not the ATF, that should act. It was at the behest of the National Rifle Association, remember, that Congress deferred to the ATF on bump stocks — another device that makes semiautomatic weapons behave like automatic ones — only to have gun rights activists, including the NRA, challenge the ATF’S authority on bump stocks.
The case is now before a U.S. Supreme Court dominated by Second Amendment hard-liners.
We realize those all seem like heavy political lifts today. But it’s been barely 24 years that Congress has allowed the routine sale of high-powered, high-capacity militarystyle weapons, whose possession the gun industry and its lobbyists have since portrayed as a Godgiven right. That wasn’t the case just a few decades ago, when Congress, conservatives, and groups like the NRA were at least somewhat less callous when it came to mass shootings of adults and children.
We could do with less lip service to “thoughts and prayers” and more real action like the 1934 National Firearms Act, which was inspired by shocking events like the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago. That infamous shooting took all of seven lives. Today, an average of 55 Americans are killed by gun violence every day. How can politicians keep enabling this?