By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
The National Firearms Act has stood since 1934, born out of the gangland violence of Prohibition to require registration and taxation of machine guns, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and suppressors. This week, according to the New York Times, the Trump Justice Department let parts of that law lapse — a retreat the Times describes as effectively unwinding one of the law's pillars.
The details of exactly which provisions lapsed, and through what mechanism, are not fully spelled out in available reporting. The Times frames it as a deliberate policy choice by the department rather than a technical accident, but the paper's account is the only source available here, and it does not include a Justice Department statement explaining the rationale or a response from gun-control advocates.
That absence is itself worth noting. A change to an 90-year-old federal weapons law — one that governs some of the most dangerous firearms categories in civilian hands — would ordinarily draw statements from the ATF, from gun-rights groups such as the NRA, and from gun-violence-prevention organizations. None of that reaction is captured in the reporting available to this desk.
What is documented is the outcome: a pillar of federal firearms regulation, untouched by Congress, has been allowed to fall away through executive inaction. Whether that constitutes deregulation by design or a bureaucratic lapse without a fuller accounting is a question this paper could not resolve on the record we have.
We will follow this story as more details, and more official comment, become available.
Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.
— Compiled from reporting by The New York Times.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."