As the country reels from yet another mass shooting — this time in Louisville, Kentucky on Monday — Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is suggesting that fully automatic weapons and “cannons” should be declared legal because when they were, mass shootings were nonexistent.
On his Firebrand podcast, Gaetz began with the right-wing’s favorite bullshit tactic whenever there’s mass deaths from gun violence: Thoughts and prayers.
From there, the Florida Republican asserted that gun control is actually the problem, not the solution.
That’s simply not true, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Gaetz doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The National Firearms Act, which outlawed automatic weapons, was enacted in 1934. Why? To stop mass shootings by gangs involved in bootlegging and organized crime, as NPR has reported:
In the 1920s and ’30s, the U.S. was dealing with a different kind of gun violence epidemic: a massive increase in organized crime, fueled by Prohibition.
Gangsters, like Al Capone, were making big money trafficking illegal alcohol. And a key weapon in their arsenal was the machine gun.
“Those criminals from the mob took advantage of the rise of the portable machine gun, capable of firing multiple rounds of ammunition with the single pull of a trigger,” says Adam Winkler, a professor at UCLA’s school of law and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over The Right to Bear Arms in America.
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