ABSTRACT
Procontrol groups have increasingly stressed the need to control various special weapon categories such as machine guns, "assault rifles," plastic guns, "Saturday Night Special" handguns, and "cop-killer" bullets. For each weapon or ammunition type, it is argued that the object is especially dangerous or particularly useful for criminal purposes, while having little or no counterbalancing utility for lawful purposes. It has been unlawful since 1934 for Americans to possess fully automatic firing weapons without special permission from the United States Department of Treasury; registering a machine gun involves being fingerprinted, undergoing a background check, and paying $200 for a tax stamp. A federal law passed in 1988 required that all guns contain a certain minimum amount of metal, thereby banning guns made entirely of nonmetallic materials such as plastic. The softness of ordinary lead bullets causes them to expand on hitting a target, increasing the bullet's cross-sectional area and thereby widening the wound cavity created by the bullet.
