The Hearing Protection Act has some people wetting themselves because they can't fathom gun rights being a good thing, but the SHORT Act has plenty doing the same thing.
There's a chance of getting both, but it remains to be seen if we will. Yet the hysteria about short-barrel rifles is hilarious if you know history.
See, while SBRs and SBSs are in the NFA, we need to understand why they're in it. There wasn't any history of the mob using them, after all, so why were they included?
Well, David Kopel talked a bit about a look at that history, and it matters.
While legal scholarship on firearms has grown tremendously since I first started writing on the issue in the late 1980s, one topic that has never been addressed in detail in any law journal is machine guns. My new article in the Wyoming Law Review, Machine Gun History and Bibliography, aims to fill the gap.
The article appears in a symposium issue of the Wyoming Law Review, based on papers presented at a 2024 conference held by the law school's Firearms Research Center, where I am a senior fellow. This was the first law school symposium ever on the National Firearms Act of 1934, one of the two foundational federal gun control statutes.
...My other favorite in the symposium is Stephen Halbrook's The Power to Tax, The Second Amendment, and the Search for Which "Gangster' Weapons" to Tax. In brief, the NFA bill as introduced also included handguns, but they were removed from the bill at the insistence of the National Rifle Association and the National Guard Association, which at the time were very closely allied. The inclusion of SBRs and short-barreled shotguns (SBSs) was simply an effort to prevent evasion of the draft restrictions on handguns. Once handguns were deleted from the NFA bill, there was no longer any reason for the bill to include SBRs or SBSs. No testimony or congressional statement claimed that either of these firearms types were a particular crime problem.
That's right. They were included because handguns were originally included, and it was believed SBRs and SBSs would serve as a workaround. In fairness, they would have been.
But handguns were dropped from the bill. No one thought about SBRs or SBSs after that, and they were included for absolutely no reason at all.
Now, though, we stand at a moment in history where we can potentially remove them as they should have been removed 90 years ago, and the usual suspects are losing their freaking minds over the topic. They can't point toward any evidence that a change in the law will make us any less safe, simply because said evidence doesn't actually exist.
Especially since it's ridiculously easy to evade the law if one so desires. Anyone can take a hacksaw to a shotgun, and short-barrel AR uppers are common as hell, and perfectly legal since AR-style pistols are a thing. Someone who wants to evade the law can easily do so. Only people's law-abiding nature keeps them from it.
And we don't have a particular issue with them as it currently stands.
Funny, that.
The SHORT Act will change that. The SHORT Act should change that.
There's no reason for the prohibition to exist, particularly when you understand the history of its inclusion. Since handguns were dropped from the draft of the NFA, SBRs and SBSs should have been dropped as well. The SHORT Act basically just fixes that oversight.
For anti-gunners to keep losing their minds over it just shows that the problem isn't safety, it's simply about restriction. We've long known that to be true, but they're tipping their hands, and we're all seeing the cards.
