Ammunition stamping: dumbasses and doubletalk
Political, Guns ·Saturday December 20, 2008 @ 22:41 EST (link)
I'd heard about this before but my father-in-law brought it to our attention. Here's the story. Once upon a time, an anti-gun businessman spent about $200k to create an ammunition-stamping system that would stamp serial numbers on batches of ammunition. He went around to ammunition manufacturers and tried to peddle it to them. They put their heads in their hands and thought: hmmm, should we pay money for this system that will increase our costs and decrease our profits? Since they're going concerns and not charities run by idiots (i.e. they're not US automakers), they laughed the guy out of their offices. But he vowed to get even, and bought up a lobbying firm or two who took some politicians out to expensive lunches and persuaded them that they should make this system law—for the good of the children, to bring dead victims back from the grave, and because criminals that will use a gun to commit crimes will certainly adhere to this law. After all, buying politicians was cheaper than employing a sales team or reading books, becoming informed, and building something the market actually wanted.
Passing a dumbass law like this would:- criminalize handloaders
- criminalize private ammunition sales
- criminalize importing ammunition (unless foreign companies also employ this useless coding, which is unlikely
- criminalize storing non-coded ammunition after 2011
- further increase size and cost of government
- do nothing to reduce crime
- inordinately increase the cost of ammunition for legal users (probably as designed)
- criminalize hitting a bullet with a hammer and removing the mark
- further reduce privacy and increase government surveillance of what are becoming not free citizens, but subjects.
You can get more propaganda from ammunitionaccountability.org (intentionally not linked). They don't tell you about states where it's already failed, of course, such as Arizona. In Washington it seems to have died in committee (we can hope). Let your legislators know that you oppose this attempt at deprivation of liberties in the strongest terms, and that their support for it means the loss of your vote.
Books finished: Investing For Dummies, Fifth Edition, Short Term Trading In the New Stock Market, Stock Market Strategies That Work, How To Make Money In Stocks, The Hand of Chaos.DVDs finished: M*A*S*H : Season #2, Back to the Future: The Complete Trilogy, Saw, Fracture, Saw II, Saw III, Saw IV.
