Putting Down the Gun

In the early 1930s, the United States had a crime problem. Across the Midwest, heavily armed outlaws like John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Clyde Barrow, and Bonnie Parker, among hordes of less notorious characters, were robbing banks seemingly at will and in the process becoming household names. In cities, gangsters made rich and powerful by a populace fond of ignoring Prohibition emerged from that experiment’s demise in 1933 with a renewed focus on gambling, loansharking, and prostitution. Along with handguns, some hoodlums carried the .45-cal. Thompson M1921 and subsequent versions of what military armorers called “submachine guns” because they fired pistol bullets rather than the rifle rounds that machine guns fired. Able to spew slugs at the rate of hundreds per minute, a “Tommy gun” was a fearsome, if marginally accurate, weapon.

The government needed a way to curb access to these and other outlaw weapons like sawed-off shotguns but had scant power to do so. At the time, Congress enjoyed only limited authority over interstate commerce, and firearms control was seen as a matter for states to handle. The contours of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms had not been tested. In early 1934, the U.S. Department of Justice came up with a clever approach to regulate certain types of firearm by using taxation to trap gunslinging gangsters. The resulting statute was the nation’s most comprehensive gun-control measure yet.

With more Americans living in cities and cities more congested, states re-examined the need to carry firearms. In 1911, New York imposed the Sullivan Act, requiring a resident wishing to keep a gun at home to apply for a permit to do so; the law required a separate permit to carry a concealed weapon. The act got its name from its sponsor, state Senator Timothy D. Sullivan, a famous Tammany Hall fixer (“King of the Bowery,” June 2019). California, Pennsylvania,