MD_Willington
Member
What gets me is, even though most people will openly complain about firearms laws in other countries, many of those other countries will allow SBR's without the TAX hassles here in the USA
Prohibition was repealed in 1933, a year before the NFA act. What there WAS, however, was a whole lot of "revenue agents" (like the Untouchables, the beginning of what is now the BATF) who now had nothing to do. The gov't doesn't like to fire people even if they are no longer useful...so they were given something else to enforce. That's my take on it anyway.Wow I cant beleive no one has picked up on this yet. Any way it has more to do with the violence caused by prohibition than any thing else. Gangsters were cutting down rifles shotguns and machine guns of all sorts to conceal them better to do their dirty work.
I was under the impression that the NFA of 1934 used the few high powered gangsters an excuse but was largely motivated out of the governments fear of an armed version of the pension march.
geronimotwo, part of the definition of a shotgun under the NFA is that it has a smooth bore, whereas pistols and rifles have a rifled bore. Therefore you can have a pistol that happens to be able to chamber and safely fire shotshells (like that Taurus revolver which can use .45 Colt and .410) but it must have a rifled bore. Smoothbore muzzle-loading pistols aren't short-barrel shotguns under the NFA because it defines a firearm as firing fixed ammunition (i.e. unitary cartridges).
So, if a shotgun is defined under the NFA as having a smooth bore, what if one were to put a rifled barrel onto a shotgun that just happened to come with a pistol grip from the factory? What if that rifled barrel was taken down to short lengths? Or is there something im overlooking?