"Firearms and the Crime Problem," address by Attorney General Homer Cummings, Baltimore, 5 October 1937

Cummings spoke before the annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Baltimore. The National Archives holds the release copy in Record Group 60 (Attorney General speeches). The catalog’s text layer is noisy, so the figures below were checked against the page image of the release copy (page 7 of the PDF).

He says that in 1934 he submitted “a bill based upon the tax power and patterned upon the Harrison Narcotic Act,” which “came to be known as the National Firearms Act.” He gives three things the bill did: it taxed manufacturers, dealers, importers and pawnbrokers and required records; it taxed the transfer of firearms and required identification of the transferee, including fingerprints and photograph; and it called for registration of the firearms then in existence. Of its passage he says that “pistols and revolvers were not included,” so that, “with the ordinary hunting rifle and shotgun excluded, and with pistols and revolvers eliminated, the act for all intents and purposes became a federal machine gun act.”

On the act’s three years of operation: “there have been registered 9,316 sub-machine guns, 11,520 machine guns and machine rifles, 16,456 miscellaneous weapons and 769 silencers.” He adds that the Department of Justice “secured from the distributors of the sub-machine gun an agreement that no sales should be made by them to other than law enforcement agencies.” The speech is the Attorney General’s own account of the law he proposed.

Object: Typed address, release copy
Maker: Homer Cummings, Attorney General
Date: 5 October 1937
Provenance: National Archives, Record Group 60, Attorney General speeches
Appears in: NARA catalog, NAID 179028714