624
Stevens, J., dissenting
Justice Stevens, with whom Justice Blackmun joins, dissenting.
To avoid a slight possibility of injustice to unsophisticated owners of machineguns and sawed-off shotguns, the Court has substituted its views of sound policy for the judgment Congress made when it enacted the National Firearms Act (or Act). Because the Court's addition to the text of 26 U. S. C. § 5861(d) is foreclosed by both the statute and our precedent, I respectfully dissent.
The Court is preoccupied with guns that "generally can be owned in perfect innocence." Ante, at 611. This case, however, involves a semiautomatic weapon that was readily convertible into a machinegun—a weapon that the jury found to be " 'a dangerous device of a type as would alert one to the likelihood of regulation.' " Ante, at 604. These are not guns "of some sort" that can be found in almost "50 percent of American homes." Ante, at 613-614.1 They are particularly dangerous—indeed, a substantial percentage of the un-registered machineguns now in circulation are converted semiautomatic weapons.2
The question presented is whether the National Firearms Act imposed on the Government the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt not only that the defendant knew he possessed a dangerous device sufficient to alert him to
1 Indeed, only about 15 percent of all the guns in the United States are semiautomatic. See National Rifle Association, Fact Sheet, Semi-Automatic Firearms 1 (Feb. 1, 1994). Although it is not known how many of those weapons are readily convertible into machineguns, it is obviously a lesser share of the total.
2 See U. S. Dept. of Justice, Attorney General's Task Force on Violent Crime: Final Report 29, 32 (Aug. 17, 1981) (stating that over an 18-month period over 20 percent of the machineguns seized or purchased by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had been converted from semi-automatic weapons by "simple tool work or the addition of readily available parts") (citing U. S. Dept. of Treasury, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Firearms Case Summary (Washington: U. S. Govt. Printing Office 1981)).
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