Yesterday was the day, May 19th, 1986 that the Firearms Owners' Protection Act (FOPA) became the law of the land. The democrats attempted to add a "machine gun ban" to the otherwise-good bill, by a late night voice vote which clearly failed. However, New York democrat leader Charles Rangel claimed the proposed ban passed the voice vote, and added it to FOPA anyway.

The machine gun ban was intended to be a "poison pill", which would prevent the passing of FOPA. However, the NRA told Ronald Reagan that they would fight the ban, and urged Reagan to sign it.

As they say, "the rest is history"...

Don't worry the NRA says they're going to fight it. Just gotta wait a bit longer.

Tyrants playing games with the people's rights.

The MG ban lost the vote but was added to the bill anyway.  Years ago on another website someone posted a video of the vote. The NFA ban lost but was added to the bill anyway. Since it was signed into law it can not be reversed for losing. I am still waiting for that NRA fight to start.

Fuck Rangel.

The footage of the MG ban vote was actually ordered by an ARFCOMMER from the Library of Congress because CSPAN's archive at the time and maybe to this day didn't go back to 1986 only like 1988 or so.

From what I remember it was a fairly expensive and time consuming endeavor to get the footage.

I think it cost almost $200 and took several weeks for them to mail him the tape.

He immediately ripped it and posted it to YouTube and it has circulated widely since that time.

There was a time on that weekend afterwards when visiting my uncles shop when he was an SOT class 3 etc gun store in Cottage Grove, Oregon, where as a 14 year old, all of the NFA stuff he had from Flemings, DLOs, HTA, LaFrance, transferables, m11s, Mac10s, you would think we will never ever run out.

Here we are today and he has virtually nothing in inventory but back then in 1986 when he had hundreds of NFAs, most of them are sitting in transfer from Curtis Higgins and some are his inventory, one back then would think we are OK, it will never run dry.