Another brilliant anti-gun idea
Gun owners dodge tax on ammunition
HARRISBURG – Pennsylvania gun owners dodged a bullet when lawmakers failed to enact legislation that would have levied a 5-cent tax on each shell and required encoding ammunition with serial numbers and registering those numbers in a statewide database.
Similar legislation has been introduced in 18 other states and the District of Columbia, but none of those bills have become law, said Ted Novin, spokesman for the National Sports Shooting Foundation in Newtown, Conn.
“Gun-control advocates have realized that it would be nearly impossible to achieve an outright ban on firearms, whether at the state or federal level,” said Novin. “Understanding this, they have recently turned to backdoor attempts at firearm prohibition – bullet serialization, which is a de facto ban on ammunition, is a perfect example of this legislative strategy.”
Under Myers’ bill, older ammunition would have to be disposed of by Jan. 1, 2010.
“It (made) the other ammunition you have illegal,” said Stolfer.
But Joe Grace, executive director of CeaseFirePA, a group pushing gun control legislation, said any technology that would help lead to arrests of people who use guns while committing crimes should be seriously considered.</em>
The reasons why this wouldn’t work are easy to see, the main one being that criminals don’t obey the law- in fact, that’s the definition of a criminal, so one would imagine that they probably will ignore the law yet again and use “illegal” ammo.
But a case resulting from this sort of law would never pass even the most rudimentary court challenge on the chain of evidence presented. When I go to the range, and shoot a semi-auto pistol, the spent cartridges fly out of the gun onto the floor- where they mingle with those shot by the other shooters that day. At some point they are swept up and put into large plastic bins and sold to a company that reloads them and sells the ammo back to the range. So unless I’m really a neat freak, or someone who does their own reloading, my used cartridges cease to be of interest to me the moment after I pull the trigger. So when your criminal type buys a box of reloaded ammo and proceeds to fire the entire brick of it (50 rounds) into some gas station attendant in the middle of the night, now the police have possibly 50 suspects to round up?
Genius, sheer genius. Really gonna help reduce crime, you betcha. But since that is only the stated goal of gun control groups, not the actual one, no one will really expect anything to change.
