Testimony before the Warren Commission of Alan Belmont, assistant to the director of the FBI (J. Edgar Hoover), in charge of all investigative work:

Mr. BELMONT: Our activities are directed to meet the terrific responsibility we have for the internal security of the country, but to meet it under the law. We feel that to place security as such above the rights of the individual or to increase these controls beyond what is absolutely essential is the first step toward the destruction of this free society that we enjoy. We have been asked many times why we don’t pick up and jail all Communists. The very people who ask those questions don’t realize that if action, unrestrained action, is taken against a particular group of people, a precedent is set which can be seized on in the future by power-hungry or unscrupulous authorities as a precedent, and which inevitably will gnaw away at this free society we have, and sooner or later will be applied to the very individuals who are seeking this action.

[This is somewhat hypocritical, given what Hoover was willing to do outside the law when it suited him, but still . . . things have changed since 1964.]

J. Edgar Hoover, before the Warren Commission, in 1964:

Mr. HOOVER: There is argument, of course, that by passing firearms legislation you are going to take the privilege of hunting away from the sportsmen of the country. I don’t share that view with any great degree of sympathy because you have to get a license to drive an automobile and you have to get a license to have a dog, and I see no reason why a man shouldn’t be willing, if he is a law-abiding citizen, to have a license to get a firearm whether it be a rifle or revolver or other firearm. It is not going to curtail his exercise of shooting for sport because the police make a check of his background. If he is a man who is entitled to a gun, a law-abiding citizen, a permit will be granted.

[Fifty years later you can still buy a firearm at a gun show without a background check.]