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Originally Posted by eldermike
1968 gun control act. It was part of the great society proposals of ([L]BJ) Lyndon Johnson. It was made possible by a crisis which puts it in line with rules for radicals type thinking that comes from the 1940's... There were four assassinations that pushed this gun control act to passage in 1968. These were John F Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, Dr Martin King.
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Originally Posted by BigDinFL
LBJ's tenure saw the explosion of the Great Society where the education system was overtaken by many leftists and socialists...
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IMHO that's true about the assassinations, but before jumping to the conclusion that gun control was an entirely leftist idea, let's not forget that the 1968 GCA would not have passed without the cooperation of the following groups:
- Southern pro-segregation conservatives upset at the ease with which increasingly mobile and prosperous blacks were able to buy firearms via mail-order and by visiting retailers in increasingly friendly Northern states. It's very difficult to lynch people when they can shoot back.
- Northeastern and Midwestern law-and-order conservatives who were scared of radical racial groups like the Black Panthers and by the urban race riots of the mid 1960s. There was a palpable fear at the time that the chaotic mobs of young hoodlums looting their own inner-city neighborhoods would morph into organized gangs of young hoodlums with firearms raiding the white suburbs.
As several other posters have pointed out, there has always been a strong racial component to gun control, and I would argue that this thinking continues today.
Also, another strong component of gun control in the immediate post-WWI era was powerful pro-business groups that wanted to keep firearms out of the hands of organized labor, or at least keep union members from displaying them openly to intimidate strikebreakers. This is the origin of numerous state laws prohibiting groups (read: labor unions) from parading with guns.