“Every rifle and shotgun owner in the country will find himself paying a special tax and having himself fingerprinted and photographed for the federal rogues gallery every time he buys or sells a gun of any description,” reads a letter from the NRA to members in 1934, seeking to rally support against what would become the first attempt at federal gun regulation.

World War I transformed American attitudes about guns. More than 17 million people had died in the conflict, which marked the introduction of highly lethal weapons like machine guns, capable of killing scores of soldiers in minutes. On the home front, bootlegging violence soared after the war, with the rise of powerful gangs that settled disputes with deadly submachine gun shootouts. These factors helped shape new efforts to restrict the sale of guns by attacking manufacturers.

In 1922, the American Bar Association recommended the closure of factories that made civilian firearms and pistols, using the slogan, “If nobody had a gun, nobody would need a gun.”

Two years later, Congress debated a measure that would ban the shipment of pistols and small firearms through the U.S. postal service. The rationale behind the legislation was that since the arms industry was geographically concentrated in New England’s Connecticut valley region—headquarters of Winchester, Colt’s, and Smith & Wesson, three of the largest gun makers in the U.S. at the time—a ban on the shipment of guns would effectively bankrupt it. (The Mailing of Firearms Act passed in 1927, but the gun industry circumvented it by using private shipment services.)

Over the next decade commentators floated the idea of nationalizing the gun industry and doing away entirely with a for-profit, commercial firearms business. A writer for the liberal-leaning Christian Century argued that keeping firearms production in “the hands of private profit seekers” was a form of “insanity.” The specter of a nationalized gun industry was a prominent enough idea at the time that it even haunted the lavish Remington centennial banquet. Its keynote speaker decried the “theory that the government should own and operate arms and munitions plants.”

In 1934, Congress began debating the National Firearms Act, legislation intended to stop the proliferation of machine guns and other weapons used by gangsters like Al Capone.

At a congressional hearing, Colt’s vice president Frank Nichols described himself as a “plain, ordinary businessman, and sometimes not a very good one,” rather than a defender of gun rights or an advocate for principle. He said he saw no reason that submachine guns should ever be manufactured or sold to civilians. Fifteen thousand Tommy guns had been sold on the U.S. civilian market in the first place only because intended foreign military contracts had fallen through, Nichols said. He argued against the imposition of new taxes on pistols under the bill, as had been originally considered, saying that gun dealers wouldn’t be able to afford the higher costs. He said he doubted that Colt’s “would be justified in continuing this small arms business” if those measures were adopted.