History
The Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 was originally passed as section 1702 of the Crime Control Act of 1990. It added 18 U.S.C. § 922(q); 18 U.S.C. § 922 itself was added by the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968.
The Supreme Court of the United States subsequently held that the Act was an unconstitutional exercise of Congressional authority under the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution in United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995). This was the first time in over half a century that the Supreme Court limited Congressional authority to legislate under the Commerce Clause.
Following the Lopez decision, President Clinton's Attoney General Janet Reno proposed changes to 18 U.S.C. § 922(q) that were adopted (or "concealed" and "widely ignored" as one author put it) in section 657 of the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act of 1997, Pub.L. 104-208, 110 Stat. 3009, enacted September 30, 1996. These minor changes required that the firearm in question "has moved in or otherwise affects interstate commerce".
As nearly all firearms have moved in Interstate Commerce at some point in their lives, critics assert this was merely a legislative tactic to circumvent the Supreme Court's ruling.
Read more about this topic: Gun-Free School Zones Act Of 1990
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)