50 Years Of Federal Gun Control: The 1968 Gun Control Act

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968. The GCA is the main federal law that governs interstate commerce of firearms in the United States. Specifically, the GCA prohibits firearms commerce across state lines except between licensed manufactures, dealers, and importers. Under the GCA, any individual or company that wants to partake in commercial activity dealing with the manufacture or importation of firearms and ammunition, or the interstate and intrastate sale of firearms must possess a Federal Firearms License (FFL).

Procedural jargon notwithstanding, the enactment of 1968 GCA was a watershed moment in U.S. politics. It was the first piece of legislation that put the gun control debate on the map.

Political Context of the GCA
It should be noted that the GCA was not the first piece of gun control passed at the federal level. In 1934, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Firearms Act of 1934 into law. The first comprehensive gun law at the federal level, the NFA taxed and mandated registration of certain firearms such as machine guns, sawed-off rifles, and sawed-off shotguns. This law was passed under the pretext of addressing mob-style violence during Prohibition. But careful review of the New Deal era shows how the NFA was just another piece of FDR’s unprecedented social engineering program.

This NFA was followed up by the Federal Firearms Act of 1938, which created a precursor to the 1968 GCA’s FFL system. Despite the government’s encroachments on gun rights, the federal government stayed away from further regulation for the next three decades.

Once the 1960s arrived, gun politics reverted back to its interventionist roots. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King caused federal policymakers to rethink gun policy. In the JFK case, considerable uproar was made about how his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was able to acquire his firearm via mail-order purchase. Even though President Lyndon Baines Johnson was not able get licensing and gun registration on the table, he succeeded in signing the GCA into law.

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