Cite as: 504 U. S. 505 (1992)
Opinion of Souter, J.
tors, "in pursuance of the clearly indicated congressional intent to cover under the National Firearms Act only such modern and lethal weapons, except pistols and revolvers, as could be used readily and efficiently by criminals or gangsters").
It is of course clear from the face of the Act that the NFA's object was to regulate certain weapons likely to be used for criminal purposes, just as the regulation of short-barreled rifles, for example, addresses a concealable weapon likely to be so used. But when Thompson/Center urges us to recognize that "the Contender pistol and carbine kit is not a criminal-type weapon," Brief for Respondent 20, it does not really address the issue of where the line should be drawn in deciding what combinations of parts are "made" into short-barreled rifles. Its argument goes to the quite different issue whether the single-shot Contender should be treated as a firearm within the meaning of the Act even when assembled with a rifle stock.
Since Thompson/Center's observations on this extraneous issue shed no light on the limits of unassembled "making" under the Act, we will say no more about congressional purpose. Nor are we helped by the NFA's legislative history, in which we find nothing to support a conclusion one way or the other about the narrow issue presented here.
III
After applying the ordinary rules of statutory construction, then, we are left with an ambiguous statute. The key to resolving the ambiguity lies in recognizing that although it is a tax statute that we construe now in a civil setting, the NFA has criminal applications that carry no additional requirement of willfulness. Cf. Cheek v. United States, 498 U. S. 192, 200 (1991) ("Congress has . . . softened the impact of the common-law presumption [that ignorance of the law is no defense to criminal prosecution] by making specific intent to violate the law an element of certain federal criminal
517
Page: Index Previous 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007