They were the mass shooters of their day, and all of America knew their names: John "the Killer" Dillinger, Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, George "Machine Gun" Kelly.
In the 1930s, the violence by the notorious gangsters was fueled by Thompson machine guns, or Tommy guns, that fired up to 600 rounds of bullets in a minute. In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was pressing Congress to act on his "New Deal for Crime," specifically a bill officially called the National Firearms Act of 1934. Informally, it was known as the "Anti-Machine Gun Bill."
At the time, "Pretty Boy" Floyd was on a rampage. Clyde Barrow and his girlfriend, Bonnie Parker, were blazing a bloody path through Oklahoma with machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. "Machine Gun" Kelly had recently been captured and sent to Leavenworth prison.
Dillinger, "with a submachine gun in his hands and a big green sedan awaiting him, shot his way out of a police trap today and once more foiled the law," The Associated Press reported from St. Paul, Minn., in the spring of 1934.
The next week in Wisconsin, Dillinger killed a federal law enforcement officer in a hail of machine-gun bullets.
Roosevelt's firearms bill proposed requiring newly purchased pistols and revolvers to be registered and owners to be fingerprinted. In February 1933 in Miami, a would-be assassin had fired a pistol at President-elect Roosevelt and then killed visiting Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.
The gun-control effort foreshadowed the current debate over assault-style rifles, the weapons used in mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. President Donald Trump said he is open to strengthening background checks for gun buyers but that he sees "no political appetite" for banning assault weapons. The National Rifle Association and gun-rights advocates argue that such a ban would violate the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment guaranteeing the right to bear arms.
But in 1934, more than two dozen states passed gun-control laws. West Virginia required gun owners to be bonded and licensed. Michigan mandated that the police approve gun buyers. Texas banned machine guns.
"Why should desperadoes, brazen outlaws of the period be permitted to purchase these weapons of destruction?" Texas' Waco News-Tribune editorialized.
Rather than banning machine guns, the Roosevelt administration proposed taxing the high-powered weapons virtually out of existence. It would place a $200 tax on the purchase of machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. The tax, equal to about $3,800 today, was steep at a time when the average annual income was about $1,780.
"A machine gun, of course, ought never to be in the hands of any private individual," U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings said at a House hearing. "There is not the slightest excuse for it, not the least in the world, and we must, if we are going to be successful in this effort to suppress crime in America, take these machine guns out of the hands of the criminal class."
Nobody expected "the underworld to be going around giving their fingerprints and getting permits to carry these weapons," Cummings said. But if they were caught with a gun that wasn't registered, they could be charged with tax evasion, just as Chicago mobster Al Capone had been.
"I want to be in a position, when I find such a person, to convict him because he has not complied," the attorney general said.
While the proposed action might have seemed drastic, he added, "I think the sooner we get to the point where we are prepared to recognize the fact that the possession of deadly weapons must be regulated and checked, the better off we are going to be as a people."
The NRA gave qualified support to the proposed law.
"I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses," testified NRA President Karl Frederick, a New York lawyer.
But he was dubious about the proposed law. "In my opinion, the useful results that can be accomplished by firearms legislation are extremely limited," he said. The NRA at the time represented "hundreds of thousands" of gun owners but not gun manufacturers.
The NRA and groups representing hunters opposed extending the tax to pistols and revolvers.
"It is a fact which cannot be refuted that a pistol or revolver in the hands of a man or woman who knows how to use it is one thing which makes the smallest man or the weakest woman the equal of the burliest thug," argued Milton Reckord, the NRA's executive vice president. But as for a bill limited to machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, he said, "We will go along with such a bill as that."
Congress eventually stripped the bill of regulations on pistols and revolvers. When Rep. Lee Doughton, D-N.C., introduced the final bill, he declared that the law would mean that the public no longer would be at the "mercy of the gangsters, racketeers and professional criminals."
But "law-abiding citizens who feel that a pistol or a revolver is essential in his home for the protection of himself and his family," he said, "should not be compelled to register his firearms and have his fingerprints taken and placed in the same class with gangsters, racketeers, and those who are known as criminals."
Congress passed the firearms act in June 1934, and Roosevelt signed it into law along with more than 100 other bills. By 1937, federal officials reported that the sale of machine guns in the United States had practically ceased. In 1938, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the law didn't violate the Constitution.
Hundreds of illegal machine guns were still around, but a crackdown by law enforcement officials basically ended the run of gangster gun violence.
A Section on 09/01/2019