Iowa generally prohibits private persons from knowingly possessing a machine gun.¹

Federal law requires machine guns to be registered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF), and generally prohibits the transfer or possession of machine guns manufactured after May 19, 1986.²

Iowa bans the sale of “a manual or power-driven trigger activating device constructed and designed so that when attached to a firearm [it] increases the rate of fire of the firearm.”³

 See our Machine Gun & Automatic Firearms policy summary for a comprehensive discussion of this issue. 

1. Iowa Code §§ 724.1(7), 724.3. Iowa defines a “machine gun” as a firearm that “shoots or is designed to shoot more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” Iowa Code § 724.1(1).[↩]
2. 18 U.S.C. § 922(o); 26 U.S.C. § 5861(d).[↩]
3. Iowa Code § 724.29.[↩]