The shooting of a Nevada senator in 1921 spurred the first big push for federal gun control
It was defeated by the firearm lobby…
The day after his term ended as senator of Nevada, Charles B. Henderson found himself on the receiving end of a bullet.
It was the afternoon of March 6, 1921, and the offices of the Senate Building in Washington were buzzing. In walked a man named Charles August Grock, a constituent and former client of Senator Henderson’s when the latter was a practicing attorney in Reno. Grock approached Henderson and shoved the barrel of his gun into the senator’s chest, according to a New York Times report at the time. Before the assailant could fire, however, Henderson grabbed his hand and forced it away. The gun discharged in the scuffle and a bullet pierced Henderson’s forearm.
Another senator and a clerk rushed to the room and found Henderson “calmly bandaging his arm and not at all excited.” The shooter apparently made no attempt to flee and was taken into custody. When questioned, he admitted to harboring a 25-year grievance against his former lawyer, after Henderson’s law firm lost his land suit. Grock had traveled from Reno, Nevada, to “get even” — at the age of 65.
“The man is not mentally sound,” said Henderson later. “He has been under treatment for mental troubles on several occasions, and it would seem that he was discharged too soon.”
Though Henderson sustained only a minor flesh wound, the incident sparked one of the first federal votes on gun control. It would be decades before the National Rifle Association officially lobbied against gun restrictions, but the business of firearms was already lucrative enough to sway lawmakers.
After Henderson was attacked, his peers in the Senate turned their attention to gun control proposals that had been languishing for years. “The recent shooting of former Senator Henderson served to focus the attention of the representatives and senators on the gun carrying habit,” one contemporary said at the time, “which is probably as widespread in the nation’s capital as in any city in the country.”
Specifically, Tennessee Senator John Knight Shields had introduced the “Pistol-Totin’ Bill” in 1915, six years before Henderson was shot. Shields, a Democrat, argued that carrying concealed weapons was a crime in every community and that measures must be taken to “reach the gun-toting evil,” according to a 1921 report by the Evening Star. If passed, he said, the law would drastically restrict interstate commerce in small firearms, which was unregulated at the time. State police and authorities had no control over the outside supply of firearms crossing the border.
The long-term effects of these restrictions, Shields argued, would result in fewer sales from out-of-state gun manufacturers and would discourage said manufacturers from making pistols, revolvers, and other such small firearms in the first place. Using hard data, he pointed to pistols as the chief firearm in gun-related violence. The American Bar Association, a supporter of his bill, estimated 9,500 murders were committed in the United States each year; in 9 out of 10, pistols were used. If a law banned customers from ordering these types of guns through the mail, it would be one step toward curbing their proliferation. In fact, Shields projected it would drastically cut the national crime rate. In one interview, he bragged that the idea was modeled after the Prohibition law.
Even then, critics knew that gun legislation wasn’t that simple. A 1921 article in the Arizona Republic, wrote, “There will inevitably be bootlegging in guns, just as there is now bootlegging in whisky.”
Furthermore, for arguably the first time, Congress proved that gun legislation would hinge on more than just practical implementation. It depended on who got paid, too. The era of gun interests as political influencers was nigh. When Shields’ bill came to the Committee of the Judiciary, Congressmen from gun-manufacturing states ensured it was killed in its tracks. We now know that Republican Senator Frank Brandegee of Connecticut — home of the Colt firearm company since the mid 19th century — opposed the bill moving forward, but no official votes were recorded.
As New York District Attorney Joab Banton would point out a few years later, “A lobbying organization maintained by the pistol manufacturers of four states makes it impossible to enact national legislation regulating the sale of firearms in interstate trade.”
Still, in 1927 Congress managed to pass the Mailing of Firearms Act, the first federal law regulating guns. The law addressed Americans’ growing distrust of the criminal other, otherwise known as the “gun-toter,” a barely veiled prejudice against certain groups thought to be culturally (or biologically) predisposed to violence.
In the following decade, the country marveled over the sensationalized stories of gangsters, mobsters, and assassins, particularly after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre that left seven dead. Hollywood represented these criminals with sawed-off shotguns and tommy guns, which, according to the 2016 history Melancholy Accidents: Three Centuries of Stray Bullets and Bad Luck, increased public fear — specifically, of firearms small enough to be easily concealed.
In an effort to pass legislation, supporters exploited the anxiety that Americans were surrounded by guns at all times, even if they didn’t know it. No one could be trusted, least of all the marginalized. Shields announced his own backing of the new bill with unabashed racism, “Can not we, the dominant race, upon whom depends the enforcement of the law, so enforce the law that we will prevent the colored people from preying upon each other?”
The National Firearms Act of 1934 passed that June. It’s considered the foundation of modern gun control efforts in America.
