Happy Spooktober! Can you imagine anything more scary than an unregulated firearm industry?

I figured since we all love guns so much I'd enrich our collective knowledge by outlining some of the gun laws in America that are enforced by the wonderful and omnipotent Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

First off, y'all remember that whole alcohol prohibition thing that we tried a while back? Well, once everyone realized that prohibition of something does absolutely nothing to deter usage or production of the prohibited item, the government decided to just go ahead and keep spending untold billions on prohibiting things anyway.

After the 21st amendment repealed the 18th, the government had a bunch of people employed with no job to do. So naturally, they dissolved the various units and returned the unused tax dollars to the citizens. LMAO, no actually they decided to take all of those revenuers and turn them on to guns. Now that the government had created the problem of organized crime due to alcohol prohibition that absolutely totally worked trust me bro, they decided to prohibit certain firearms from reaching the general public through something called the National Firearms Act in 1934. They basically tried to prohibit fun guns from reaching the average joe through a series of hoops and taxes that law abiding people didn't want to go through. Since we all know that organized crime is fully deterred by laws, the NFA achieved the desired outcome of keeping dangerous guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals. oh wait, no it didn't. sorry.

After a few decades of everyone minding their own business, the FBI and CIA got together during the civil rights movement and decided they didn't want those people to own guns. After assassinating a few high profile leaders and a sitting president, someone finally started thinking about the children and passed the Gun Control act of 1968 which gave us many of the common sense restrictions we have today. Age of purchase, inventory logging, serial number requirements, etc.

After another couple of decades, the '90s gave us the Brady act, which mandates background checks on all FFL transactions, as well as the Assault Weapons Ban which dramatically reduced gun crime and deaths. Pay no attention that crime rates were steadily declining before 1994 and continued to decline after the sunset of the AWB. That reduction in crime rates was totally the result of a bill that reduced the amount of ammunition you can have in a magazine. Criminals always pay attention to laws and certainly wouldn't find a way around them.

Now that the BATFE had laws working in their favor, they could begin manipulating people into breaking those laws, then shooting their wives and children.

I won't go into all the details because most of you know them, but here are a few links for some light reading.

Hope this doesn't scare anyone too much.

https://ammo.com/articles/waco-siege-branch-davidian-compound-standoff-atf-raid-us-federal-government

https://ammo.com/articles/ruby-ridge-siege-forgotten-history-weaver-family-atf-standoff-militia

https://ammo.com/articles/operation-fast-and-furious-atf-gunwalking-scandal-forgotten-history

https://web.archive.org/web/20160513031656/http://www.jsonline.com:80/watchdog/backfire-190528221.html

https://www.americanpartisan.org/2020/03/history-of-the-atf-how-the-bureau-of-alcohol-tobacco-firearms-became-corrupt-abusive/