Banning assault weapons the old-fashioned way

Remember the Tommy gun? If you do, it’s probably from those old gangster movies with Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney mowing down rival gangsters and cops or G-Man J. Edgar Hoover posing menacingly with his very own Tommy gun.

Formally known as the Thompson submachine gun after its inventor, the Tommy gun was the favored weapon for criminals and Hoover’s Gangbusters during Prohibition and the Depression until it was taxed out of existence by the New Deal. Doing it that way proved to be a novel — and so far, unmatched — way to eliminate an assault weapon without leaving a fingerprint on the Second Amendment.

Although the Thompson and various adaptations of the gun remained a staple of law enforcement and the military for many years, it became too expensive for civilians, the good guys and the bad, after a hefty tax was imposed on the weapon in 1934. 

Like its successor, the AR-15, the Thompson submachine gun was invented as a military weapon for the sole purpose of killing large numbers of the enemy with a few, brief bursts. But its use as a mass murder weapon by the gangs of Al Capone and other crime bosses made rich by Prohibition eventually led to its own prohibition.

Gangs in Chicago, the era’s crime capital, were said to own as many as 500 machine guns and used them in drive-by shootings, pitched battles with enemies on both sides of the law and most infamously, in the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre when members of Al Capone’s gang lined up seven members of “Bugs” Moran’s gang in a southside garage and shot them in the back. 

These highly publicized murders prompted the Illinois legislature to ban the private use of machine guns over the strong objections of the state’s leading newspaper, the then-reactionary Chicago Tribune, which invented the argument that only innocent gun owners would be harmed. The paper mocked its position many years later by writing:

“In other words, when Tommy guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have Tommy guns and the peaceable citizen will not have the ability to return machine gun fire when needed.”

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By 1934, newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt, reacting to the post-Prohibition Tommy gunning by and to the likes of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and Bonnie and Clyde, launched what he called a “New Deal for Crime.”

Its centerpiece, reported The Washington Post in a 2012 history of gun control, was the National Firearms Act of 1934. This first federal gun control law didn’t ban any weapon, but imposed a restrictive $200 tax on the manufacture or sale of both machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. In addition, buyers had to be fingerprinted and every sale had to be recorded in a national registry. The $200 tax amounted to about about $3,500 in today’s dollars, causing private sales to tank and the Tommy gun became a collector’s piece.

But when a Chicago gang member named Miller was arrested with a sawed-off shotgun two years later, he was convicted of tax evasion and appealed his conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

The court was then dominated by conservative justices appointed by Roosevelt’s Republican predecessors, Presidents Hoover, Coolidge and Harding, but the Second Amendment had not yet become holy writ for conservatives and the court ruled that a sawed-off shotgun had no “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia” and upheld the Roosevelt tax/ban. 

The Miller decision also noted that weapons, “not in common use” by private citizens — Tommy guns, for example — could also be restricted by a ban or tax. Or, as the 21st-century version of The Chicago Tribune noted, the Miller decision decided, “if only outlaws use this gun, we should probably outlaw it.” 

The National Rifle Association was around during the Depression, but it didn’t become the lobbying powerhouse it is today until the 1970s. Founded in 1871 by Union officers concerned that their troops fired an average of a thousand shots before hitting a Rebel in the Civil War, the NRA was initially devoted to improving shooting skills and gun safety.

But when the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. prompted some overdue restrictions on gun sales in 1968, the organization’s gun manufacturing sponsors became worried and the modern NRA emerged as a potent lobbyist.

By 1986, the NRA had contributed to and/or frightened a sufficient number of Democratic and Republican members of Congress to begin the process of watering down the provisions of the 1968 law. Pro-gun legislation passed but not before gun control advocates successfully slipped in an amendment banning the Tommy gun. 

The largely symbolic vote on Tommy guns awakened the lunatic wing of the NRA and they vowed never to give an inch in the future. It’s a vow they’ve faithfully kept. 

Will the NRA’s most fervent “sportsmen” finally relent and at least keep guns out of the hands of suspected terrorists not even allowed on an airplane or improve background checks to detect dangerous individuals before they buy guns? Don’t bet on it. 

 Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.