At Ammoland yesterday, Dean Weingarten had a post following up his previous post on the "incrementalists vs. the "all or nothing" crowd on the Second Amendment. You can read that article here. I must confess that I have at different times been in both camps, believing in one, then the other. As I have gotten older, I have come down on the side of the "incrementalists." But as someone who grew up in a state where my rights under the Second Amendment were not recognized, taking a baby step at a time approach seemed much as Martin Luther King must have felt when he said a right delayed is a right denied. Weingarten post is entitled Incremental Strategy To Reform and Repeal the National Firearms Act. It is a masterpiece that I urge gentle readers to read in full.
As the title suggests, Weingarten lays out a three part strategy for dismantling the NFA. First needs to be education of both the gun culture and the general public. Taking this approach is necessary, and may well not fully happen in my lifetime. Remember that the "shall issue" concealed carry movement started in Florida in 1987, or 36 years ago. But that was based on a number of scholarly studies and efforts to show that the "may-issue," which function for the average person as a "won't issue" regime was historically and practically wrongheaded. Dismantling the NFA will require the same sort of effort.
The second stage of Weingarten's strategy is to overwhelm the NFA system with compliance. Taking a page out of the Cloward - Piven strategy of the Left, Weingarten shows that the original $200 tax on NFA firearms that was effectively a ban has become within reach of most Americans. As a result, the numbers have grown. We need to keep those numbers going up and up and up.
The second step, again, well underway, is to overwhelm the system with compliance. This sounds counter-intuitive, but it has a strong and corrosive effect on the NFA. One of the insidious components of the NFA was to create extreme, prohibitive taxes to make the NFA an effective ban instead of regulation. When the Act was passed, the $200 tax was equivalent to $3,700 today. It was 40 times the cost of a Maxim silencer. In 1938, the first federal minimum wage was set at 25 cents an hour. In 1938 it would take 800 hours of minimum wage labor to pay the insane $200 tax. Today the federal minimum wage is $7.25, with 30 states having significantly higher minimums. With the growth of the Federal government and the debasement of the U.S. dollar over 80 years, the tax has been reduced from 800 hours of minimum wage labor to less than 28 hours of minimum wage labor. In 1934, the tax took almost two months pay for the average income; today the tax is about one day’s pay for the average income.
For decades, there were very few people who could afford legal NFA items. Today, the vast majority of Americans can afford the $200 tax. This has led to enormous increases in the numbers of people who have legal NFA items.
Virtually everyone who has to go through the insane loops required to obtain an NFA item is disgusted with the sheer idiocy of the law. With knowledge comes support for repeal of the NFA, in part or in all.
- In 1990, there were 399 form 1s (make your own NFA item) and 7,024 Form 4s (transfer/buy from someone else) processed.
- In 2020, there were 40,790 form 1s and 246,600 Form 4s processed, an increase of 100x for form 1s and 35x for form 4s.
Every person who takes a legal silencer to the gun club, contributes to the demise of the NFA. Every hobbyist who makes a Short Barreled Rifle legally, contributes to the demise of the NFA. There are now over 2.6 million legal silencers in the United States. In 1990, there were about 30,000 (estimated). Overwhelming compliance leads to normalization and acceptance by the gun culture and eventually the general public. Acceptance leads to the dismantling of the National Firearms Act.
The third step is to begin taking apart the NFA piece by piece. There is already movement to remove silencers from the law. While hearing protection becomes more and more effective, there really is no reason to have silencers in the law in the first place. They don't make your gun silent, despite the movie depictions of silenced guns. They just reduce the noise coming out of the muzzle from ear splitting to a dull roar. Hollywood depictions of silencers on revolvers are totally ridiculous because the sound of the round going off comes not just out of the barrel but also out of the rear of the chamber through the slight gap there. If you have a silencer equipped pistol, I still recommend you still wear hearing protectors.
The final step should be the repeal of the NFA as antithetical to the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court is a follower, not a leader, in protecting the Bill of Rights. When activists and states make enough progress showing the insanity of the NFA, the courts will eventually follow. Unfortunately, that is reality as this correspondent sees it.
The actions are not necessarily sequential. Many can and should overlap and proceed concurrently.
The United States may be the only country with the equivalent of the Second Amendment. We should cherish it as we cherish our other enumerated rights. We certainly shouldn't let the devilcrat gun-grabbers whittle away our rights one salami slice at a time.
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