I’m sure the push back would be comparable, but doesn’t it make more send to target ammo sales (as well as ammo component sales) to curb gun violence? By target, I mean creating an insane tax on the sale of ammo that makes it near impossible to buy a lot of. I believe Chris Rock did a bit on this a long time ago.
Gun sale bans have always seemed like a silly solution as there are already 300 million guns in the US. You could ban all sales today and in 100 years I’d bet 2/3rds of those would still be in working order. Not to mention the wrench that 3D printers through into the mix. Banning ammo components, like any other banned substance, would actually have a huge effect on the usefulness of a gun as a mass murder weapon in just a few years.
I don’t remember what country it is, it might be more than one. But anyway, civilians aren’t allowed to own weapons that are chambered for military ammunition. So no 5.56, 7.62, 9mm, .45, etc.
Sounds like a great idea.
So maybe outlawing the sale or manufacture of those calibers would help.
Keep your shiny black gun; you have nothing to shoot through it.
That leaves a lot of reloadable brass out there. Maybe you can reload your own, but you’re limited to a certain amount of powder and have to cast your own bullets. Also, you’re not allowed to sell or otherwise transfer your reloads to another person.
We’d see pretty quick who the real enthusiasts are.
This half-baked idea had been brought to you by ‘delayed going in to the gas station in order to post and damn I have to pee.’
One problem is that a “mass shooting” doesn’t really require all that many shots to be fired. Most of the time the mass shooter is going to be caught or killed before they can fire more than a few hundred rounds, tops. And the mass shooter usually kills themselves, so they are not going to be concerned about the credit card bill.
So you could not make ammo expensive enough that it wasn’t still readily affordable for the purposes of a mass shooting without making it impossible to get enough ammo for target practice or hunting or other legal shooting sports. Today, to have a good time at the range you do need to bring a few hundred rounds.
So what you are proposing is indistinguishable from an actual gun ban, and is not any more politically viable. If you could make ammo have a $5+ per round tax, you could also ban semi-automatic rifles and all handguns. (that is, if you had the political power to do one, you could do the other)
Another issue is that ammo is not difficult to make if you start with the base components. Your tax would need to apply to gunpowder, primer, and especially brass shell casings as well as the finished rounds.
It’s been discussed in threads before, but the short answer is no…it wouldn’t affect them at all. Not only are there over 300 million guns in the US, but there are quite literally billions of rounds of ammunition of all calibers, plus reloading equipment all over the place along with brass and powder. Hell, I know people who were so afraid that Obama was going to do just this that they have thousands of rounds (10’s of thousands in some cases) squirreled away so the gubbermint can’t gets it. Not to mention the fact that if you make something illegal that even 10% of the population want they will find less legal means to get it, and it would be easier to smuggle in bullets or even powder than drugs.
Depends on how you store it most likely. A quick Google search says most ammunition is designed to be stored in the proper conditions at least a decade, and I seem to recall the military having ammo a lot longer than that in surplus. Heck, I seem to recall people diving on WWII wrecks still worried about rounds and shells being live, and sometimes they find WWI shells in Europe that didn’t explode but are still live.
*“You don’t need no gun control, you know what you need? We need some bullet control. Men, we need to control the bullets, that’s right. I think all bullets should cost five thousand dollars… five thousand dollars per bullet… You know why? Cause if a bullet cost five thousand dollars there would be no more innocent bystanders.
Yeah! Every time somebody get shot we’d say, ‘Damn, he must have done something … Shit, he’s got fifty thousand dollars worth of bullets in his ass.’
And people would think before they killed somebody if a bullet cost five thousand dollars. ‘Man I would blow your fucking head off…if I could afford it.’ ‘I’m gonna get me another job, I’m going to start saving some money, and you’re a dead man. You’d better hope I can’t get no bullets on layaway.’
So even if you get shot by a stray bullet, you wouldn’t have to go to no doctor to get it taken out. Whoever shot you would take their bullet back, like "I believe you got my property.”* ~Chris Rock
Wouldn’t it be easier to ban all mass murder weapons (explosives, bombs, cars, trucks, knives, pipes, pressure cookers, etc.) instead of just banning the ammunition that makes a firearm lethal? Oh wait a minute, a mass murderer could still beat their victims to death with a non-operational firearm.
I think it would be more effective if you identified, and prevented, psychopaths from murdering anyone with whatever weapon they chose to commit murder. YMMV.
On ‘pro-gun’ forums people talk about finding early cased ammo from the civil war and shooting it off. And yeah, WW2 ammo in an M1 from an ammo can, about 95% of the rounds will still fire.
a. The first bit is totally a non-starter. The same political party that wants no gun control wants absolutely no socialized medicine to pay for any sort of mental health care. If you want to prevent psychopaths, well, for the ones that have a clear diagnosis you can lock them in a funny farm and/or give them drugs. Both require billions of dollars in state funding, or it ain’t gonna happen.
Also, most mass shooters did not show clear and obvious symptoms that would justify such actions beforehand.
b. The second is a common myth. You read about mass stabbings? Here’s one.
This guy stabbed 14 people. Oh, right, they all lived. Turns out it’s a lot harder to kill someone with a muscle powered knife than it is to fire a weapon that required just a few ounces of trigger pressure and has been specifically designed for combat.
Trucks require a commercial license to rent, reducing by a factor of several hundred times how many people can get one for a killing spree.
Bombs are harder to kill lots of people than you might think. Boston marathon bombers only got 3 people. A massive bomb could kill dozens of people, but it is much harder to make a large bomb than to just go to the nearest gun store or gun show and load up.
Yeah, you see lots of cases of old ammo being found from the world wars and bomb squads have to come out and deal with it.
But that only means it might still be dangerous.
I would say the shelf life of ammo is how long it is still reliable. I would not call a clip of 20 rounds as having a shelf life of 20 years if only six shells fire when you try them.
ETA: Just an example. Don’t get hung up on those numbers.
The route to gun control has been shown to us by republicans trying to end abortions. Death by a thousand cuts.
So, mandate things like:
Gun stores must store all weapons not on display in a Class 5-B vault. When the store is closed all weapons on display must be moved into the vault and the vault locked. The lock on the vault must have a 15 minute delay timer.
Mandatory two day waiting period to buy a gun.
Anyone buying a gun needs to speak with a counselor about other options like knives and bats and Kung-Fu lessons.
Anyone buying a gun must be shown pictures of innocent gunshot victims and at least 50% of which need to be children who were shot.
All hallways/doorways in the gun store must conform to standards set for Emergency Rooms.
Why? Because “reasons”. Similar laws applying to abortion clinics worked because apparently the state doesn’t have to show there is a good reason for it. Just that they can mumble a reason for it…again does not have to be a good one. Keep laying it on till they are gone.
If you think we have a lot of guns, your mind would probably be blown at the estimates for ammo in American civilians’ hands. If we have enough guns to arm every man, woman, and child in America (and we probably do), we also probably have enough ammo to shoot every living person on earth, repeatedly.
If we never produced one additional round of ammo, we’d still have enough ammo lying around to keep shooting each other for a hundred years.
Your plan would have the disadvantage, at least from gun owners’ perspective, of making target practice and hunting prohibitively expensive.
My point is that reliable ammo lasts around a decade (or so I’ve read) where as properly cared for guns can last centuries. Limiting the quantity or outright banning the sale of ammo, and creating an ammo tax per state (for all ammo components) would be more effective at reducing gun violence than any gun sale restrictions.
Obviously it’s not politically possible to do this now and I don’t know how you get around that. Someone else figure that out.
Even if you are right and it has a shelf life of 10 years, I don’t see how this would work…unless you are talking about maybe limiting gun violence 10 years from now and assuming in that sort of time frame no one can figure out any ways around it. Doesn’t seem that effective a strategy to be honest.
Umm, no. We have fired WW1 period ammo, worked fairly well. Properly stored WW2 ammon, that is now 70 years old? No problem. Reloading? Pretty damn easy.
and outright banning would certainly cause a Second Ad issue.
