LIBERALS, SOCIALISTS WANT TO BAN AMMO
By
NWV News writer Jim Kouri
Posted 1:00 AM Eastern
February 16, 2009
© NewsWithViews.com
Gun
owners are alarmed over what they're witnessing in Washington, DC and
state legislatures across the country. Realizing they could not succeed
in disarming American citizens, Liberal organizations and their political
representatives have decided to allow armed citizens to possess all
the guns they wish. The hitch is, according to political strategist
Mike Baker, the so-called gun-grabbers have decided to track ammunition
for those guns by encoding the cartridges and maintaining a database.
Ammo control laws will also stipulate that uncoded ammunition will be
confiscated either voluntarily or through coercive means, according
to Baker.
There are a number of states that have proposed legislation not to control guns, but to control the ammunition those guns utilize, claims Baker.
Basically
the new state laws would provide that, after a specific date, all handgun
and “assault weapon” ammunition manufactured or sold in
the state shall be coded by the manufacturer, and would include a list
of all calibers covered by the coding requirement. It would mandate
the disposal by a certain date of all non-coded ammunition listed, whether
owned by private citizens or retail outlets.
At the federal level, H.R. 408 introduced by Rep. Robert Andrews (D-NJ)
a new law would require firearms manufacturers to provide ballistics
information on all new firearms to BATF, which would retain the information
in a National Firearms Ballistics Database. Critics claim part of this
bill will be used to mandate encoding ammunition, which is part and
parcel of "ballistics" information.
"[Lawmakers] should ignore the media hype on the firearms issue
and pay attention to what the public – their constituents –
are saying on the matter,” gun rights expert John M. Snyder stated.
“According to an August poll conducted by Zogby International for Associated Television News, the American public rejects the notion that new gun control laws are needed by a two-to-one margin,” Snyder continued.
“Maybe the House of Representatives should have taken a reading of public opinion on this issue before rushing headlong without a roll call vote to pass a bill before the recess,” said Snyder, who is a firearms advisor to the National Association of Chiefs of Police.
Legal
experts say that the US Constitution's Tenth Amendment prohibits the
federal government from making and enforcing such laws and that controlling
ammunition and other such activities are relegated to the individual
states.
As a result, such legislation is pending in 18 states: Alabama, Arizona,
California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland,
Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island,
South Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington.
Most, if not all of these states are using a model law created
by a left-wing organization Ammunition Accountability. Perusal of
that organization's web site provides visitors with a recommended law
for use by states seeking to control guns by using a "backdoor"
approach.
For instance, the Ammunition Accountability web site features an article
appearing in the Seattle Weekly about one group's mission to push an
ammo control law through the Washington state legislature.
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According to the Seattle Times news story, the idea for coding ammunition originated when the three proponents of ammo coding "heard the story of a police shooting where two officers fired their weapons, but only one hit the suspect. In an investigation of the shooting, both officers were put on leave, since there wasn't an immediate way to determine which one of them had fired the bullet."
While state legislatures differ in the wording of their proposed laws, basically they all require that any and all ammunition be encoded by the manufacturer and they will maintain a mandatory data base of all ammunition sales.
"We of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms oppose this backdoor approach to gun control," Snyder, an official with that gun rights group, told NewswithViews.com.
The
sample legislation stipulates that, “each year in the United States,
more than 30 percent of all homicides that involve a gun go unsolved;
handgun ammunition accounts for 80 percent of all ammunition sold in
the United States; current technology for matching a bullet used in
a crime to the gun that fired it has worked moderately well for years,
but presupposes that the weapon was recovered by law enforcement;”
and “bullet coding is a new and effective way for law enforcement
to quickly identify persons of interest in gun crime investigations.”
Ammunition coding technology works by laser etching the back of each
bullet with an alpha-numeric serial number. Then when a customer purchases
a box of, for example, 9mm cartridges, the box of ammunition and the
bullets’ coding numbers would be connected to the purchaser in
a statewide or national database.
The code on the bullet can be read with a simple magnifying glass and then be run through a statewide or national database to determine who purchased the ammunition and where.
The rationale being used by proponents of such laws is that cartridges can be used to trace a gun owner who committed a crime such as murder or assault with a deadly weapon, according to the National Association for Gun Rights' Executive Director Dudley Brown.
But opponents of ammo registration laws counter that this will only increase the incidents of criminals collecting spent cartridges and depriving police of other evidence such as fingerprints on a cartridge left at the crime scene.
"NAGR's strategy is simple: make the enemies of our firearms freedoms pay for every inch. While many so-called "gun rights groups" work to curry favor with politicians and the media, NAGR is working aggressively to hold politicians accountable and to put a stop to gun control," said Brown.
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"Liberal gun-grabbers are a cunning lot," said Mike Baker. "Instead of concentrating on disarming citizens of their weapons, they're attempting to render those weapons useless by controlling the ammunition. First, they'll keep records of ammunition sold and collect uncoded ammo, then they will be in a better position to restrict the sale of ammunition to law-abiding citizens. It's a cunning approach to disarming Americans," he said.
