Jeff Folloder was en route to West Point, Ky., for the biannual Knob Creek machine-gun shoot and military gun show when I spoke to him about the booming machine-gun business. As with semiautomatic weapons, machine-gun sales have spiked in recent years, and an enthusiastic culture of collectors and devotees now flourishes around the most heavily regulated weapons in America.

The three-day event in West Point is the largest of its kind, attracting dealers, collectors, and gun enthusiasts from around the country. It includes a night shoot, where men take aim at barrels of fuel attached to pyrotechnic charges. “The charges are set off by the impact of the bullets, creating fiery mushroom clouds and fireballs from hell!” according to the website of the Knob Creek Gun Range, and video of previous shoots shows the fireballs lighting up the dark sky.

Folloder is the executive director of the National Firearms Act Trade & Collectors Association (NFATCA), a membership organization that is akin to the National Rifle Association, but which advocates specifically for the interests of those who own weapons and accessories regulated by the National Firearms Act (NFA) — machine guns, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and silencers, among others. The federal government imposes legal and bureaucratic hurdles to owning an NFA weapon, and the NFATCA helps its members negotiate them.

The demand for these weapons has never been higher. At a show like the one in Knob Creek, Folloder says, “You blink once and you miss somebody who looks totally nondescript who’s willing to plunk down $80,000 to buy a gun, who says they’ve been trying to track it down for years.”

Machine guns are scarce in the United States. With only 182,000 in circulation — and a law preventing civilians from buying any machine gun that wasn’t in circulation in 1986 — they have caught the attention of gun enthusiasts and collectors alike. “It’s sort of like land, they’re not making it anymore,” Folloder explains.

He traces the growing interest in automatic weapons and their associated parts not to the political reaction to the recent massacre in Newtown, Conn., but to President Obama’s election. It was in 2009 that “we saw the numbers starting to escalate from our end of it,” he recounts.

In fact, the number of NFA weapons processed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has increased steadily over the past decade, rising from 156,000 in 2005 to over 1.1 million in 2011, the most recent year on record.

Looking beyond the weapons regulated by the NFA and considering all firearms, a larger pattern is clear. The number of firearms manufactured in the United States peaked at around 5.5 million in 2009, according to the ATF — an increase of over a million from the previous year. Since then, the number has remained fairly constant.

The country had not witnessed such a dramatic increase since 1993, the year after Bill Clinton was elected president, and the year before Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein’s assault-weapons ban was signed into law. The number of guns manufactured rose above 5 million in 1993, from around 4.1 million the year before; in 1994, it rose to 5.1 million before declining again.

Even among gun aficionados, the collection and use of automatic weapons has not historically been a mainstream hobby, and it has not always been looked upon kindly. But that is changing. If there once was “some baggage attached to it,” Folloder says, “it’s not there now.” “We’re actually out in the open in the broad daylight talking to regular people about machine guns and suppressors, things that were in the past relegated to the backrooms and the dark shadows. We’re in a different place now.”

Even today, though, many Americans mistakenly believe that owning an automatic weapon is illegal. Folloder is dedicated to correcting the record. He wants people to know that “you can lawfully own this stuff, depending on where you live, as long as you’ve got patience and diligence.”

The recent surge in gun ownership may be one of the unintended consequences of the gun-control policies embraced by both the Obama and the Clinton administrations. Folloder says his clients are driven by a “rational or irrational fear” that the federal government or various states will criminalize or otherwise prevent the ownership of machine guns and other weapons regulated by the NFA. “People are buying them now because they can, they have the resources to do it, and they think that in some way, somehow they’ll be restricted.”

Weapons regulated by the NFA, according to Folloder, are unlikely to be touched by federal regulation now or in the future. “I have a little bit of difficulty seeing that anything could be done to eliminate the NFA. I don’t see that as something that’s even on the radar screen right now.”

Passed in 1934, the NFA was an attempt to limit the circulation of firearms by imposing a tax on the purchase of machine guns and short-barrel weapons. The weapons covered by the Act are the most heavily regulated in the United States, and, says Folloder, his clients have great need for guidance in navigating the regulations.

Today, weapons must be registered, and purchases — or “transfers” — must occur in the state where the purchaser resides. The ATF must preapprove all transfers. Given the demand and the resulting bureaucratic backlog, Folloder says, somebody who today purchases a weapon regulated by the NFA “knows he will be waiting for upwards of a year to get the toy that he paid for.”

“This community goes to great lengths not just to abide by the laws but to abide by very complex and onerous laws,” Folloder notes. Given the time, the effort, and, above all, the money required to obtain an NFA weapon, you’re not going to use it in a crime, he argues. “If you’re going to pay $80,000, $90,000, or $100,000 on a gun, that gun is not going to be used in a crime, there is too much invested in it. People are not going to go through this effort just to turn into a gangster. It just doesn’t happen.”

While gangsters wielding automatic weapons haven’t materialized, many enthusiastic and devoted collectors have. “You get one or two people together and it may be an eccentric hobby,” Folloder remarks. “You get thousands, tens of thousands, and you start having conventions.”

— Eliana Johnson is media editor of National Review Online.