Cite as: 511 U. S. 600 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
possession—makes their actions entirely innocent.10 The
Government does not dispute the contention that virtually any semiautomatic weapon may be converted, either by internal modification or, in some cases, simply by wear and tear, into a machinegun within the meaning of the Act. Cf. United States v. Anderson, 885 F. 2d 1248, 1251, 1253- 1254 (CA5 1989) (en banc). Such a gun may give no externally visible indication that it is fully automatic. See United States v. Herbert, 698 F. 2d 981, 986 (CA9), cert. denied, 464 U. S. 821 (1983). But in the Government's view, any person who has purchased what he believes to be a semiautomatic rifle or handgun, or who simply has inherited a gun from a relative and left it untouched in an attic or basement, can be subject to imprisonment, despite absolute ignorance of the gun's firing capabilities, if the gun turns out to be an automatic.
We concur in the Fifth Circuit's conclusion on this point: "It is unthinkable to us that Congress intended to subject such law-abiding, well-intentioned citizens to a possible ten-year term of imprisonment if . . . what they genuinely and reasonably believed was a conventional semi-automatic [weapon] turns out to have worn down into or been secretly modified to be a fully automatic weapon." Anderson, supra, at 1254. As we noted in Morissette, the "purpose and obvious effect of doing away with the requirement of a guilty intent is to ease the prosecution's path to conviction." 342 U. S., at 263.11 We are reluctant to impute that purpose to
10 We, of course, express no view concerning the inferences a jury may have drawn regarding petitioner's knowledge from the evidence in this case.
11 The Government contends that Congress intended precisely such an aid to obtaining convictions, because requiring proof of knowledge would place too heavy a burden on the Government and obstruct the proper functioning of § 5861(d). Cf. United States v. Balint, 258 U. S. 250, 254 (1922) (difficulty of proving knowledge suggests Congress did not intend to require mens rea). But knowledge can be inferred from circumstantial
615
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