Inside the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the rules you still follow today

Walk into a gun shop tomorrow and watch what happens at the counter. A clerk asks for your ID. You fill out a form. The clerk looks at the serial number on the gun and writes it down. You are asked whether you are a felon, whether you are a fugitive, whether you use illegal drugs. If you are twenty years old and want a handgun, the clerk shakes his head. Every one of those steps is older than the internet, older than the personal computer, and older than the moon landing. They were written into law in 1968, in the worst year in modern American politics, by a country that had just buried two of its heroes.

If you want to know why the rules look the way they do, forget the slogans and read the date. 1968 explains almost everything: what the law did, what it declined to do, and why the argument it started has not ended in more than half a century.

What came before: the Federal Firearms Act of 1938

The Gun Control Act did not appear from nowhere. Four years after the National Firearms Act of 1934 (see Why the National Firearms Act of 1934 taxed guns instead of banning them), Congress passed the Federal Firearms Act of 1938, signed on June 30, 1938. It was the first federal law to regulate ordinary firearms, and it was modest.

It required manufacturers, importers and dealers who shipped firearms in interstate commerce to get a federal license, and the license cost a dollar. They had to keep records of their sales. They could not knowingly ship a firearm to a person convicted of certain violent crimes, or to someone under indictment, or to a fugitive. And that was most of it. The law had a famously big hole: it did not regulate ordinary buyers, and it did not require anyone to verify who was buying. A mail-order customer could sign his name to an order form, and no one checked.

For thirty years that was federal gun law. Then a series of killings made it look inadequate.

Three assassinations

The story is told in three dates.

November 22, 1963. President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. The rifle used, an Italian military surplus Carcano, had been bought by mail from a Chicago sporting goods dealer, under an alias, through an advertisement in a magazine. That detail stayed with a number of lawmakers. A Connecticut senator, Thomas Dodd, chaired a subcommittee that held hearings on mail-order firearms and juvenile delinquency and pressed for a bill to regulate the mail-order trade.

April 4, 1968. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.

June 5, 1968. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles shortly after winning the California Democratic primary, and he died the next day.

Five years of failed gun bills suddenly looked different. In a span of two months in 1968, two of the nation's most prominent public figures had been shot to death. There was riot and unrest in the cities, and the country was in no mood to wait. The politics of crime and the politics of guns merged, and Congress moved.

Two laws, one year

People often say "the 1968 law" as if it were one statute. It was two, passed months apart, and the second one cleaned up after the first.

The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, June 1968

Signed by President Lyndon Johnson on June 19, 1968, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act was a sprawling crime bill with provisions on police grants, wiretapping and confessions. Several of its titles had nothing to do with guns. Title III authorized court-ordered wiretaps for criminal investigations. Title II was an attempt to limit the effect of the Miranda decision, a provision the Supreme Court eventually refused to enforce in 2000 in Dickerson v. United States.

But the bill also carried gun provisions. Title IV banned the mail-order sale of handguns and the over-the-counter sale of handguns to out-of-state residents, and set a minimum age of twenty-one for handgun purchases. And a separate title, Title VII, made it a federal crime for several categories of people to possess or receive firearms, including convicted felons, people dishonorably discharged from the military, people judged mentally incompetent, and others. That list is the ancestor of the one in the modern 18 U.S.C. 922(g). (See what a federal background check covers, and what it never did.)

The Gun Control Act, October 1968

The broader law followed. The Gun Control Act of 1968, signed by President Johnson on October 22, 1968, replaced the 1938 statute and rewrote the whole field. The pieces that matter to you are these.

1. Federal licensing of dealers. Anyone in the business of dealing in firearms needed a federal firearms license. That created the entire modern category of the federally licensed dealer, the FFL, which is the person who fills out your paperwork at the counter.
2. A ban on interstate sales to individuals. The law barred the sale of firearms across state lines to individuals who did not hold a license. If you live in one state and want to buy a gun in another, the gun typically has to be shipped to a licensed dealer in your state. The ban applied to mail-order sales of all firearms, long guns included.
3. Form 4473 and record-keeping. Licensed dealers had to keep records of each sale, including the buyer's identity. Today the form is the ATF's Form 4473, which you sign at the counter.
4. Prohibited persons. The law set out the categories of people who could not lawfully buy or possess firearms, including felons, fugitives, unlawful drug users and those adjudicated mentally defective or committed to an institution, and made it a crime for a dealer to knowingly sell to them.
5. Serial numbers. Licensed manufacturers and importers had to mark firearms with serial numbers. This is why every commercial gun you see has one, and why the tracing system in What the ATF is, what it can do and why gun owners distrust it can work at all.
6. Age limits. A licensed dealer could not sell a handgun to anyone under twenty-one, or a rifle or shotgun to anyone under eighteen.
7. A "sporting purposes" test for imports. The law restricted the importation of firearms to those that the Treasury Secretary found were suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes. That test was used to keep out cheap, short-barreled foreign handguns, and it shaped the import market for decades.
8. Additions to the National Firearms Act. The Act added "destructive devices," such as certain explosive devices and large-bore weapons, to the NFA regime.
9. Ammunition rules. The Act also required ammunition sellers to be licensed and to keep records of ammunition sales. Gun owners found that provision particularly galling, and the 1986 reform law repealed it. A rule that makes a farm-supply clerk keep a ledger of every box of shells sold is the sort of idea that sounds sensible in a hearing room and ridiculous at a checkout counter.

The Act also assigned the enforcement job to the Treasury Department's Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division. That is how the future ATF became the national firearms regulator. (See What the ATF is, what it can do and why gun owners distrust it.)

What Congress declined to pass

This is the part that gets forgotten, and it is the part conservatives should remember. Look at what the 1968 Congress did not do.

President Johnson asked for more. He called for a national system of firearms registration and licensing of gun owners. Congress said no. The final law regulated dealers and certain categories of people. It did not register guns, and it did not require owners to obtain a license to possess a firearm. The registration and owner-licensing ideas were left on the table, and they have never become federal law for ordinary firearms. (The registry fight that never died is in the registry question hiding inside every universal background check bill.)

That tells you something about how the sausage was made. Even in the emotional wake of two assassinations, with a popular President pressing the case, Congress drew a line at a national list of guns and owners. Whatever you think of the rest of the law, that line held.

Why the Act was controversial then, and still is

The 1968 law has defenders and critics on every page.

The defenders' case. The 1938 law was too weak to be useful. The mail-order loophole was real, and the Kennedy rifle proved it. Licensing dealers created accountability in the supply chain. Prohibiting violent criminals, drug addicts and fugitives from owning guns was and is common sense. Most gun owners, including most conservatives, accepted the core of the law and still do.

The critics' case, in three parts.

1. Paperwork as punishment. The Act's record-keeping rules turned small clerical mistakes into potential felonies for dealers. By the early 1980s, a movement of gun owners, backed by a Senate subcommittee report, argued that enforcement had been heavy-handed. That movement produced the 1986 reform law, which softened the "knowingly" standard and limited inspections. (See How the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act passed with a machine gun ban.)
2. The interstate ban. Barring individuals from buying a gun outside their home state, critics argued, burdened lawful commerce and hunters and collectors for little benefit. The 1986 law relaxed this for long guns.
3. Fear of a slippery slope. Gun owners pointed to President Johnson's registration proposal as a sign of what some leaders wanted. Whether or not you accept that reading, the memory shaped the politics of every later fight.

I would say the most honest summary is this: the core of the 1968 law, licensed dealers, a form at the counter, serial numbers and a list of people who may not buy, is accepted across most of the political spectrum. The fights are at the edges, and they are about enforcement, records and the line between regulating commerce and building a list.

What it means at your counter

Here is what the 1968 law means for you in practice, translated.

• Your ID and your signature. You fill out Form 4473 and answer the questions truthfully. Lying on it is a federal crime.
• Your out-of-state purchase. If you buy a gun in another state, it goes to a dealer in your home state for the transfer, except for certain long-gun exceptions in later law. Check before you drive.
• Your age. There are separate federal minimum ages for buying handguns and long guns from a dealer. States may set higher ones. Courts have been reviewing age limits in recent years, so check the current rules.
• Your serial number. Don't remove it, alter it or buy a gun that has had it removed. That is a federal felony.
• Your records. Your dealer keeps the paper. The government does not keep a national list of what you bought.

If you are buying your first firearm, how to buy your first firearm lawfully from the counter to the car takes you from the counter to the car. And if you plan to take it anywhere, before you drive across state lines with a gun, run this checklist covers the rules of the road.

The lesson of 1968

There is a pattern in how Washington writes law, and 1968 is its textbook example. A tragedy produces a bill. The bill is drafted fast and passed fast. It includes things that address the tragedy and things that do not. Some of it works. Some of it gets quietly dropped. Some of it reappears decades later in a different form, and the people who inherit it spend years untangling what the authors really meant.

The conservative answer is not to refuse to legislate after a tragedy. It is to insist on three habits: write narrowly, test each provision against the facts of the case that prompted it, and put an expiration date or a review requirement on anything that gives the government new power over a constitutional right. In 1968 Congress did some of that, and in 1986 it had to clean up the rest.

The bottom line

• The Gun Control Act of 1968, signed October 22, 1968, replaced the weak Federal Firearms Act of 1938. It created the modern licensed dealer, Form 4473, serial numbers, the prohibited-person list, age limits and the interstate sales ban.
• It followed the assassinations of President Kennedy in 1963, Dr. King on April 4, 1968, and Senator Robert Kennedy in June 1968. A separate crime law that June added the first handgun and possession provisions.
• Congress declined President Johnson's proposals for gun registration and owner licensing. That line has held in federal law for ordinary firearms.
• The 1986 reform law exists because gun owners argued the 1968 enforcement went too far. Know what each law does so you can tell which rule you are living under.
• Follow the counter rules to the letter, never alter a serial number, check the rules in each state you pass through, and press your representatives to write future gun laws narrowly, with a review date.