gca68

On this day, fifty years ago President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed into law the Gun Control Act of 1968, which focused on regulating the firearms industry and owners by restricting interstate trade in guns and weapons to licensed dealers and exporters.
The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly five years earlier prompted the legislation, which still languished in Congress and the Senate, when it was discovered that the president was killed with a rifle purchased by mail-order from a magazine. The murders of Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert Kennedy earlier in 1968 renewed the effort to change the law, which additionally mandated that buyers have licenses for and register their weapons and prohibited categories of persons, including felons and the mentally incompetent, from owning guns.