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Reagan signed one of the worst pieces of gun control legislation ever. The misnamed “Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986.” No new select fire weapons were permitted in civilian hands. Some of the other provisions of the Act were OK, but that one was unconstitutional on its face.

> “Reagan signed one of the worst pieces of gun control legislation ever. The misnamed “Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986.””

You obviously were not old enough to own a hadgun before this was passed. If so, you would remember back then that we had to fill out forms just to buy handgun ammunition. Right in the forms for an FFL, we had to agree to waive our 4th amendment rights for any place we owned, partially owned, leased, rented, or borrowed. The BATF could show up as many times as they wanted and whenever they wanted to search an FFL’s belongings. Etc, Etc, Etc. There were a lot of other problems that I have not mentioned which were addressed with Reagan’s bill.

Before and after that, I have only seen ONE occasion when gun controls were relaxed. That was when the Brady bill expired. Keep in mind that the Gun Control Act has been in place nearly 50 years. When it passed, I remember a lot of gunowners saying that we would toss out all the b*st*rds at the next election and repeal the law. Instead, we have only won (narrowly) twice in all that time and you would have thrown one of them away.

The fully automatic amendment was put into place at the last minute as a “poison pill” to kill the bill. It failed.

"Reagan signed one of the worst pieces of gun control legislation ever. The misnamed “Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986.” No new select fire weapons were permitted in civilian hands. Some of the other provisions of the Act were OK, but that one was unconstitutional on its face."

That was a last minute amendment stuck in the bill by Bill Hughes. You can watch it here:

Hughes Amendment

As you can see, our buddy Charlie Rangle was presiding over the hearing and the voice vote was clearly for the nays. He ruled that is was passed. Even so, there were a lot of good things in this bill. The NRA supported it. Things like transferring weapons between states. Before, you could be driving through a state to go hunting in some other state and be illegal and jailed. Now, if you have the gun properly stored in your car, you can travel anywhere with your guns and ammo.