The ways that we’ve kept a lid on civilian machine gun ownership have always been through indirect regulatory measures. The NFA of 1934 imposed a $200 tax on them, which was a lot of money back then. This deterred all but the most highly organized criminals from getting them, which was fine since Al Capone himself was going to get a machine gun no matter what you did. But there weren’t that many Al Capones, so it worked out.

Then there was GCA in 1968. This banned importation of machine guns into the country. GCA was partly motivated by Vietnam vets returning home with Soviet-made AK-47s, and the general uptick in interest in machine guns from our being in a protracted infantry-heavy land war.

Then there was FOPA in 1986. This banned possession of any machine gun manufactured after May 19, 1986. The effect of this was to permanently fix the number of civilian-owned machine guns at the number it was at that time. The Federal Government knows the exact number of machine guns which are legally registered in the US, since they already had to be registered with BATF to be legal. Due to privacy concerns however, the Feds demure from publishing this exact number, but it’s understood to be around 150,000.

In terms of proliferation, the effect of fixing the supply of legally ownable machine guns has meant that the cost for them has gone through the roof. Currently it’ll set you back about $20,000 or so to own your very own machine gun to play around with. Which returns us to roughly where we were in the 1930s, with only rich people being able to afford one. And once again, proliferation is curbed, but indirectly through imposition of cost rather than just outlawing them.

But of course machine guns gotta machine, and gun nuts gotta nut, so the would-be weekend warrior Rambos among us have never stopped complaining about how FOPA is “literally tearing up the Constitution” by denying them their God-given right to go grocery shopping with a belt-fed mini gun at arms length that can saw a car in half if the need arises. In the canned goods aisle. As the Founding Fathers intended.

By way of a central rallying point, the full-auto freaks have descended on what they feel was a procedural shenanigan at the very last minute when Congress passed the 1986 law. Supposedly the God/USA/freedom-hating duo of Reps William Hughes and Charlie Rangel (from the damn liberal freedom-hating states of NJ and NY, respectively) conspired to sneak in the evil “Hughes Amendment” to the gun bill by calling a floor vote passed in the informal “the ayes have it” way, when (supposedly) the ayes did NOT have it. So this is the rallying cry of the full-auto flock, and they just keep at it, and keep demanding we return again for the first time to those thrilling days of yesterparallel universe when men were men, women cooked, and you only had to set down your drum-fed Thompson submachine gun for as long as it took to work the starter crank on the front of your Model T and motor on over to the Machine Gun Store to buy more machine guns for your family.

[Cue Sally Strothers voiceover, grainy video clip of skinny Somalian village girl: “This is Tanna. Each day, Tanna must walk 27 miles uphill both ways to fetch ammo and fatigues for her family of sixteen. Your gift of just $10 a month can make such a difference, not only in the lives of one Somali village, but also to the quarterly earnings of the domestic weapons manufacturers. Won’t you please give? Like, NOW???]

By the way, the Hughes Amendment stuff is, as you’d guess, complete bullshit. There WAS rangling going on (haha) over the bill, and the gun lobby WAS fighting it. But fighting for the rights of machine gun owners wasn’t a particular interest of the NRA back then, so while they always prefer less regulation of any of their full line of Liberty™-conferring products, they were pretty happy with all the other stuff that FOPA gifted them, and the machine gun freeze was a small concession as far as they were concerned.

But…whenever you want to make sense of what you’re hearing from the gun lobby and their wild-eyed tin shackin’, manifesto writin’ VIP customers, all you really have to do is sit down and estimate whether a particular product of theirs would be likely to significantly impact overall industry profit margins. While naturally a brand new machine gun sold at retail would no doubt be a very nice money-maker for the industry, what they know is that they wouldn’t ultimately make their money on the gun itself, but on the ammo. Machine guns use ammo really really fast. So if suddenly all their weekend warrior customers could rush out and pick up a machine gun at Walmart and head straight over to the shooting range to live out their action movie fantasies, the industry would be selling ammo so fast that they’d probably have to buy up half of Wyoming just to house all the new dye stamping machines they’d need to keep up with demand. Cha-CHING!!

This aspect of it goes hand-in-glove with another related development in the industry, which is a recent wave of consolidation among the domestic gun makers and the domestic ammo makers. These days, the gun industry actually posts slightly more gross sales from ammo than from guns. So while you’d always have Bug-eyed Earl the white separatist Uzi fan, and he’ll always be reaching for the biggest megaphone he can find/afford to rally his long-suffering troops, the fact that you can see some pretty slick, well-produced calls for deregulating full auto means that the well-heeled K Street gun lobby is backing Bug-eyed Earl in a calculated fashion. Probably copy editing his manifesto for him as we speak. Actually you know what, Earl? Howsabout you just stay back there in your tin shack and count your skids of Dinty Moore Beef Stew for the coming Obamalypse, and we’ll handle the press releases shall we? That’ll be a lot less embarrassing for everybody I think. We’ll call you on the Batphone if we need you to show up in DC for a creepy photo op. Buh-bye now Earl, Susan will show you out…

And that’s probably way more than you ever wanted to know on this sunny, full-Autumn day about full-auto in the US. Join us next week when Tricorn Pictures presents Part II of this series: “A Selective Memory History of Select Fire: Why Thomas Jefferson wanted his slaves to conceal carry M16s”. Brought to you by Heckler & Coca Cola: “Have a Koch and a smile — -or die trying!”