Amended the Gun Control Act of 1968 to repeal some of the sillier provisions of that enactment, including the ban on transportation of one's own firearms to another state (which had been a hassle particularly for hunters), the record keeping requirement on the sale of ammunition (which generated enormous quantities of useless paper), the ban on interstate sales of long guns (which, then as now, are infrequently used in crime); and limited the surprise inspections of licensed gun dealers' premises to just once a year. It also made it a federal offense, whether a Federally licensed firearms dealer or not, to transfer or sell a gun to any individual who is prohibited by the GCA '68 from owning guns, such as a felon.
In a peculiar procedural move, the House-passed version of this NRA-backed legislation contained a ban on the possession and transfer of new machineguns by civilians, which became effective when President Reagan signed the Act into law, May 19, 1986. Machineguns which were manufactured prior to that date are regulated under the National Firearms Act, but those manufactured after the ban cannot be sold even to civilians who are already licensed to own machineguns. The Senate approved the machinegun ban language of the House bill without a roll call vote, though their original bill did not include the ban amendment added in the House and sponsored by U.S. Rep. William J. Hughes (D - N.J.). (The parliamentary shenanigans surrounding this are quite strange, and are found in Congressional Record v.132 p.H1751 and p.S5358.) Essentially, at what was literally the last minute, the acting chairman of the Committee of the Whole in the then-Democrat-run House, New York congressman Charles Rangell, declared in a simple voice vote that Rep. Hughes' "poison pill" amendment had been adopted, and that the "ayes" had it. This ban has later been found unconstitutional in the case of U.S. v. Rock Island Armory (Federal Supplement, v.773 p.117) but the decision was not appealed to the Supreme Court.
