Abramski v U.S. Supreme Court Decision (Straw Purchase case)

[HankB]

....Kind of makes me feel like I am in Nazi Germany...

Phooey! If you were in Nazi Germany, they'd be rounding up Jews, Gypsies, Hispanics, Gays, etc., wholesale and sending them to the gas chambers. When I was growing up I knew people with numbers tattooed on their arms. You don't know anything about being in Nazi Germany.

Really? Then you have no clue what life was like in Nazi Germany. Let me know when the US starts up those extermination camps.

We do not have death camps - nor do I think we're headed there. And knowing what the Nazis were all about, I generally hate modern comparisons with those maniacs. BUT (you knew this was coming, right?) during the early years of Nazi Germany - say, before Kristallnacht in November 1938 - Germany didn't have death camps, either; however, they were becoming increasingly repressive, selectively discriminatory against certain groups via government power (think of using the IRS against tea party groups), and seemingly unbound by their own laws. (Someone said "I have a phone and a pen" . . . )

Of interest and relevance to people reading these forums and at least tangentially related to the topic of this thread, at least one writer has asserted that GCA '68 was inspired by the Nazi weapon law of 1938. (link: http://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/GCA_68.htm ) In addition to the JPFO website, this assertion was also published in Guns & Ammo magazine around 20 years ago.

 

[Frank Ettin]

...Of interest and relevance to people reading these forums and at least tangentially related to the topic of this thread, at least one writer has asserted that GCA '68 was inspired by the Nazi weapon law of 1938. (link: http://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/GCA_68.htm ) In addition to the JPFO website, this assertion was also published in Guns & Ammo magazine around 20 years ago.

But it is substantially wrong. For an authoritative and accurate discussion of Nazi gun laws see here and here.

 

[Arizona_Mike]

Has anyone else noticed that when you are at the end of this thread it says "Page 5 of 6" but you cannot get to page 6?

Mike

 

[dogtown tom]

Arizona_Mike Has anyone else noticed that when you are at the end of this thread it says "Page 5 of 6" but you cannot get to page 6?

You have to know the secret code to view page 6.

 

[JRH6856]

Has anyone else noticed that when you are at the end of this thread it says "Page 5 of 6" but you cannot get to page 6?

Mike

Nope. I only have one page. I have my options set to show 150 posts per page.

 

[Arizona_Mike]

You have to know the secret code to view page 6.

I suspect a software glitch and that the thread had gone to 6 pages and tthen back to 5 due to deltetions.

Mike

 

[Arizona_Mike]

But it is substantially wrong. For an authoritative and accurate discussion of Nazi gun laws see here and here.

Frank, thanks for those excellent links. It has taken some time to go through them but it has been time well spent. They should probably be in a sticky in the advocacy section.

It has been a long time since I have read JPFO's literature but at a glance it does not seem to have been changed significantly since the mid '90s. At a high level, I am not seeing the disagreement. The argument of both Halbrook and the JPFO seems to be that gun control laws have hidden dangers, the Nazis used gun control laws to aid their opperssion, and that many of the laws had been written before the Nazis by politicians who never intended that they be used that way.

I have always thought that there could be multiple explanations for the correspondance between Dodd and tthe Library of Congress while the GCA '68 was being written. The most generous explanation is that Dodd wanted to avoid the creation of a registry which the GCA attemted to do (and was improved by later amendment particularly the '86 reforms).

Mike

 

[Midwest]

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I have always thought that there could be multiple explanations for the correspondance between Dodd and tthe Library of Congress while the GCA '68 was being written. The most generous explanation is that Dodd wanted to avoid the creation of a registry which the GCA attemted to do (and was improved by later amendment particularly the '86 reforms).

Mike

It is my understanding that Dodd wrote that letter (on purpose) to the Library of Congress to give the impression and to 'leave a trail' to claim that he never saw the Nazi gun laws until after much of the 1968 GCA was already pretty much written up.

This is an eyeopener to those who have never seen this.

http://www.firearmstalk.com/forums/f97/origins-gun-control-act-1968-warning-long-26881/

"The Nuremberg Trials

After WWII, the Allied powers decided to put over one hundred Nazis on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nuremberg was where GWA38 was enacted (1938) as well as all the other Nazi laws (1935) and was a Nazi rally point every summer.

Supreme Court Justice Robert H Johnson was reported to have remarked on his unusual selection of the completely bombed-out city of Nuremberg for the trials, "This is where the Nazis began and this is where they will come to an end."

As part of the US prosecuting group, Thomas J Dodd stood as assistant to Justice Jackson. Thomas Dodd is a key figure here, because 22 years later, he would become the author and sponsor of GCA68 and several other gun control bills in the mid 1960s.

Even though the subject of German firearms laws never surfaced directly in the trials, it is quite possible and even probable that Thomas Dodd studied German gun control laws while in Germany and perhaps even took copies of some of them home after the trials. While it cannot be absolutely determined that he took home copies, it is uncontestable that he indeed had a copy in his possession by 1968.

A letter from the Library of Congress has been found, dated July, 1968, where a librarian returned to Senator Dodd the 1938 German law translated into English as he had requested of them, along with the Xerox copy he furnished for the translation. In this matter, it raises the intriguing question of why he furnished a copy of the 1938 law to the Library since they had their own copy to use.

Some speculate that Senator Dodd spoke German as was apparent during the trials when he cross-examined witnesses. While the President of the hearings repeatedly asked some witnesses to slow down so the interpreter could keep up, Senator Dodd never made the same request. So, it would not be a stretch to assume that he did follow the German language.

And you might ask, if he could converse in German, why the translation to start with? The answer, it appears, was to "launder" GWA38 through the Library of Congress to fend off any criticism that the legislation closely resembled GWA38.


It is also interesting to note that when President LBJ tried to push for registration and licensing of all firearms in the US in 1965, Senator Dodd remarked "that's Nazi legislation." Now, how did he know that unless he was very familiar with Nazi laws? We could certainly speculate that Senator Dodd had been doing some heavy study of German gun control laws for several years prior to the mid 1960's. "



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[gc70]

I continue to be disturbed that the majority of the Court allowed ATF to effectively create a crime through interpretation.

The "actual transferee/buyer" question (11a) is the only question on the transferee portion of Form 4473 that is not specifically addressed in law (18 USC Chapter 44) or regulation (27 CFR 478). Rather than using its rulemaking authority to define or clarify "transferee" as used in the law, ATF simply interpreted the law to achieve the result in question 11a. It seems quite novel (at least to me) that a government agency would be able to criminalize an act at will through an administrative interpretation rather than the transparent and accountable rulemaking process of the Administrative Procedures Act.

Scalia expressed a similar concern at the end of his dissent.

On the majority’s view, if the bureaucrats responsible for creating Form 4473 decided to ask about the buyer’s favorite color, a false response would be a federal crime. That is not what the statute says. The statute punishes misstatements “with respect to information required to be kept,” §924(a)(1)(A) (emphasis added), not with respect to “information contained in forms required to be kept.” Because neither the Act nor any regulation requires a dealer to keep a record of whether a customer is purchasing a gun for himself or for an eligible third party, that question had no place on Form 4473—any more than would the question whether the customer was purchasing the gun as a gift for a particular individual and, if so, who that individual was.