They Were Killers With Submachine Guns. Then the President Went After Their Weapons

They were the mass shooters of their day, and all of America knew their names: John “the Killer” Dillinger, Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, George “Machine Gun” Kelly.

In the 1930s, the violence by the notorious gangsters was fueled by Thompson submachine guns, or Tommy guns, that fired up to 600 rounds of bullets in a minute. In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was pressing Congress to act on his “New Deal for Crime,” specifically a bill officially called the National Firearms Act of 1934. Informally, it was known as the “Anti-Machine Gun Bill.”

At the time, Pretty Boy Floyd was on a killing spree. Clyde Barrow and his girlfriend, Bonnie Parker, were blazing a bloody path through Oklahoma with submachine guns and sawed-off shotguns. Machine Gun Kelly had recently been captured and sent to Leavenworth prison.

Dillinger, “with a submachine gun in his hands and a big green sedan awaiting him, shot his way out of a police trap today and once more foiled the law,” the Associated Press reported from St. Paul, Minn., in the spring of 1934.