What is the history of gun control?
Basically, there has been very little gun control in this country. There really are only three major gun control acts that have ever been adopted. One was the 1934 National Firearms Act. This was a reaction to the violence that was going on in the gangster era, in the Al Capone era during the Depression, and Congress at that stage acted basically to ban machine guns and similar sorts of weapons, sawed off shotguns, machine guns. That happened in 1934 and we didn’t have any other real gun regulation in the country until 1968 after the assassinations of Senator Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Junior, some of the rioting in the streets during the 60s. Congress adopted the Gun Control Act of 1968. This basically set out a list of prohibited purchasers, people that according to federal law would not be allowed to buy guns, and primarily focused on felons, those who were a danger to themselves or others because of mental illness, as well as some other categories of people. There was no ot
