I do not want an "assault rifle" ban

[Xithras]

68. Per the Supreme Court, there's no way to force existing users to register anyway. It's a moot point.

The original 1934 NFA, the law that banned fully automatic machine guns and silencers, required that the existing owners of those weapons register them, and banned felons from owning firearms. In 1968 a convicted felon was caught with an automatic firearm and was charged with not registering it.

The guy claimed that a law requiring him to register his firearms would be illegal. Why? Because he's a felon, so owning a gun is a crime. By forcing him to register a firearm that he originally purchased legally, the government was essentially FORCING him to confess to a crime, which was a violation of his Fifth Amendment rights. The Supreme Court agreed in Haynes vs. United States. The court decision created a completely idiotic registration framework where law-abiding citizens were required to register their firearms, but CRIMINALS were constitutionally protected from doing so.

The NFA was amended shortly afterward to put into place the system we have today. Instead of the original and unconstitutional system, where people were forced to register their own firearms, the law instead refocused on the resale and transfer of firearms. The Supreme Court has upheld that as being legal. The governments presumption was that, by heavily regulating them at the point of sale, the availability of the weapons would decrease over time as the current owners sold them off or died. This has largely been borne out, and today it's exceptionally rare to find someone who owns one of these guns without an NFA license. There have only been two incidents of NFA registered automatic weapons being used in a crime in the U.S. in nearly 80 years (and one of those incidents involved a police officer who went nuts).