Muscarello v. United States - The National Firearms Act

On 15 February 1933, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, scheduled to be sworn in as President of the United States on March 4, was speaking at Bay Front Park in Miami when an assassin fired five shots at the bandstand. Police wrestled the would-be assassin, Giuseppe Zingara, to the ground, and later found in his pocket a newspaper clipping regarding the assassination of President William McKinley thirty-two years before. "I'd kill every president," he later told police. But instead of killing the president-elect, his shots fatally wounded Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.

The incident, along with widespread fears concerning the spread of gangland violence at the behest of Al Capone at others, led Congress to pass one of the nation's first significant pieces of gun-control legislation. This was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which placed taxes on--and therefore required the registration of--machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and rifles.

A generation after the 1934 National Firearms Act, in 1968, assassination again led to the passage of a gun-control act. In that year, assassins shot and killed civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy. As a result, Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968.