After one Georgia gun lover wanted to build his own machine gun, the NRA got its worst defeat ever
’Drug dealers and others bent on violence are the only ones who need machine guns.’
It turned out J.D. Farmer had missed his opportunity to own a machine gun by just five months. But he figured he could still build one for his private collection.
Congress had just passed the Firearm Owners Protection Act, a law that restored many previously restricted gun rights but banned machine guns manufactured after May 19, 1986. But Farmer, a gunsmith and enthusiast from Smyrna, Georgia, wasn’t prepared to give up. He filed an application with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) in October and provided fingerprints, agreed to a background check, and submitted the $200 tax. The ATF turned him down, citing the unlawful “making of new machine guns for possession by private persons.”
Farmer sued ATF director Stephen Higgins in federal court. One of his lawyers argued that Farmer “made a living from manufacturing machine guns. He was selling them to collectors and…his automatic weapons were used on such TV shows as Miami Vice and the miniseries Amerika.” Judge Owen Forrester ruled in Farmer’s favor.
But Farmer’s luck ran out. A court of appeals overturned the decision. It was that moment that the NRA leveled up. They would step in and appeal to the Supreme Court.
Really, it was their mess to begin with. The organization had agreed to the 1986 provision that banned machine guns. No law-abiding citizen needed a machine gun, the concession seemed to say. But after the House voted and Reagan signed the bill into law, the NRA realized it had made a huge mistake. Its increasingly hard-line base demanded the Second Amendment be interpreted in strict terms: Machine guns belonged in their arsenal.
In 1990, the NRA saw an opportunity and attempted to correct itself. It requested the Supreme Court review Farmer’s case. If a federal court granted Farmer a right to his machine gun, then it might imply that the Second Amendment allowed private use of weapons otherwise banned by the federal government. According to NRA Executive Vice President at the time, Wayne LaPierre, repealing the automatic weapons ban became a “top priority.”
The problem was the appellate court ruling. The Ninth Circuit of Appeals maintained that the Second Amendment did not prevent Congress from banning private citizens from owning weapons of war. So, in December of 1990, the NRA petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the ban on machine gun ownership. The country waited for the justices to weigh in.
Meanwhile, the NRA attacked the lower court’s ruling on Farmer’s machine gun as a direct affront to the Constitution. It was “the first ban on firearms possession by law-abiding citizens in American history,” argued the NRA’s Firearms Civil Rights Legal Defense Fund in Farmer’s appeal. “Why they want to own [machine guns] I don’t know,” NRA Director of Federal Affairs James Jay Baker told the Washington Post. “But the fact is, there are 125,000 people who for whatever reason are willing to go through all the hoopla,” and they should be able to exercise their rights. Besides, the NRA argued, there were still plenty of federal restrictions in place to protect the public, including background checks, fingerprinting, and various methods of registration.
Police forces and gun control advocates fought back. “The Supreme Court shouldn’t even dignify the petition by hearing this case,” said Police Chief David B. Mitchell, of Prince George’s County, Maryland, in a press conference. He continued, “We are not equipped to face people armed with machine guns. They have no place in civilized society.” Don Cahill of the National Fraternal Order of Police announced, “Drug dealers and others bent on violence are the only ones who need machine guns.” Jim Brady, former White House press secretary who was partially paralyzed during the assassination attempt of President Ronald Reagan, maintained a sense of humor: The Second Amendment has just about as much to do with the right to bear arms as the “right to arm bears,” he said.
Although machine guns are rarely used in criminal activity today (one of the reasons the Las Vegas massacre remains unusual), their illegality remains problematic to die-hard gun advocates. If the courts uphold a ban on one kind of gun, they could ban others. It’s why the NRA chooses to focus on a strategically extracted phrase in the Second Amendment: the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” and proclaims it unconditional. Rarely do they invoke the phrasing in its entirety: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The “militia” reference makes gun rights advocates nervous. It threatens gun ownership for individuals, who have nothing to do with organized militia.
In 1939’s U.S. v. Miller, the Supreme Court ruled, “With obvious purpose to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of such (military) forces, the declaration and guarantee of the Second Amendment were made. It must be interpreted with that end in view.” And further back, in the 1876 U.S. v. Cruikshank ruling, “The ‘bearing of arms for a lawful purpose’ is not a right granted by the Constitution.”
But by 1990, the Supreme Court hadn’t issued a ruling clarifying the Second Amendment in more 50 years. “A great deal is at stake,” Dennis A. Henigan, director of the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence Legal Action Project said. “If the Supreme Court were to endorse anything close to the NRA’s doctrine, it would threaten every sensible gun law in this country.”
On January 14, 1991, the Supreme Court dismissed the proposed suit and refused to issue a written opinion. Its decision undermined the NRA’s claim that an individual has the unconditional right to bear arms. Gun advocacy groups later called the court’s decision to uphold the ban on machine guns the “worst legal defeat ever” for the NRA.
Today the U.S. closely tracks an estimated legal 193,000 machine guns manufactured before that year, and machine gun deaths are rare. Still, simple kits to get semi-automatic weapons closer to automatic — like the “bump stocks” the shooter used to mimic automatic fire in the Las Vegas massacre — are among the most popular modifications on the market.
