In 1963 and 1965, Senator Tom Dodd of Connecticut introduced bills to regulate the inter-state commerce in guns. They went nowhere. Then, after the death of President John F. Kennedy, both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were slain by assassins. In 1968, Congress passed two laws that extended gun regulation. One law raised the age of legal purchase of a gun to 21.[1] The other regulated inter-state commerce in guns, outlawing the mail order sale of guns, and the buying of guns by felons, drug users, and people who had been involuntarily committed to a mental institution.[2] There matters rested for almost 20 years. They didn’t do a Hell of a lot of good: in 1981 a crazy person tried to kill President Ronald Reagan.

Between 1968 and 1986, some politically-active gun owners came to believe that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), which enforced federal gun-control laws, had often abused its authority. As a result, some of the restrictions of the 1968 Act were rolled-back by the Firearm Owners Protection Act (1986).[3] One provision of the act barred the federal government from running a registry of owners of non-NFA weapons (machine guns, sawn-off shotguns) sales. Another expanded and clarified the list of people who could not buy guns.

In 1990, Congress passed the Gun Free School Zone Act[4] which barred possession of a gun within 1,000 feet of a school. In cities, schools are everywhere. The law meant to provide grounds for arrest for people in big cities, although—the bureaucratic mind at work—it has also been applied to hunters in New Hampshire. However, in 1995 the Supreme Court overturned this law as unconstitutional. The Clinton Administration then passed a revised Act.

In 1993, Congress passed the Brady Bill.[5] This law required a background check on gun-buyers and a five day waiting period until a computerized system became available.[6] That system, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, came on-line in 1998. It applied to “long guns” as well as hand guns, even though long guns account for only a small fraction of homicides.[7]

In 1994, in reaction to several mass shootings, Congress passed a ten-year ban on the manufacture and sale of “assault weapons.”[8] The law helped to bog down the discussion of what constituted an “assault weapon” by focusing on trivia rather than the key issue of the receiver, which controlled the rate of fire. There matters rested for almost 15 years.

In 2008 and 2010, in two separate cases, the Supreme Court held that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right and that federal law trumps state law.[9] For the moment, at least, the quarrel between “individual right” and “collective right” advocates which opened in Kentucky 200 years before has been settled.

[1] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnibus_Crime_Control_and_Safe_Streets_Act_of_1968 So, my folks giving me a gun on my 12^th birthday was not illegal. Also, it occurred in 1966, before the law went into effect.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_Control_Act_of_1968 See, also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5IWK9sRYTs

[3] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_Owners_Protection_Act

[4] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-Free_School_Zones_Act_of_1990

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_Handgun_Violence_Prevention_Act

[6] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haeYj82a9f4

[7] In all likelihood, this drove gun owners wild. It probably made non-gun-owning liberals all warm and gooey.

[8] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban

[9] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller; andhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald_v._City_of_Chicago. In the McDonald case, the city of Chicago had refused to issue hand-gun permits since 1982, effectively disarming law-abiding citizens, rather than criminals.