Ammunition Accountability Act

Recently, there has been a bunch of discussion of the "Ammunition Accountability Act", which is wending its' way through as many as 18 state legislatures. This bill would require all ammo makers to serialize every case and bullet, and keep records all the way to the end buyer, so that evidence recovered at a crime scene could be tied to the purchaser, who would of course be the perpetrator of the crime until he or she proves innocence.

This act would also require that all non-serialized ammo be turned over to your friendly local police department for destruction by a certain date. Reloading would be outlawed, and possession of unmarked ammo would be cause for a long visit to the state penitentiary and a permanent loss of your right to self-protection.

There would be a 'nominal' tax of say, $0,05 per round, to cover 'government costs'.

The thing they keep forgetting to tell us is that besides the $0.05 or whatever 'tax' on each round, there's also going to be a cost to the manufacturer - for the equipment (nonexistent) to do the marking, for the rebuilding of all assembly lines - right now, shells are made by the hundreds of thousands in one plant, and mated to bullets, also made by the hundreds of thousands in another plant. The marking needs to be done at the 'making' stage in either case, or it becomes 'rework', which is
much more expensive. Each serialized cartridge then needs to be continually tracked from the bullet seating and crimping die all the way to the end user - which means thousands of pages of records, because, of course, 'electronic' records won't be suitable for tracking such dangerous commodities.

Off the top of my head, I figure manufacturer's costs to be somewhere around $0.10 per cartridge to retool, and another $0.50 - $0.75 for the handling and record keeping. So, a box of 550 .22LR would have an added cost of anywhere from $357.50 - $495.00, which, of course, gets passed on to you, the consumer.

This scenario does not take into account the fact that Wal-Mart or your friendly local FFL will have to keep records and transmit them to the feds daily, or even on a per-transaction basis, so they need to add something for their time and expense.

Who's up for a $250.00 can-plinking session? A visit to Knob Creek might set you back $1M just for ammo.

There has also been a bit of talk saying that this is 'just' a state level thing, and it should be defeated in most cases. True. Most states in our Union are more intelligent and sensible than CONgress, and more likely to listen to their citizens.

The danger is if the Osama administration gets hold of this idea as it's newest cure-all - once the next depression is averted, and all our troops are home from Iraq, of course, that it will be rammed through CONgress. Even if all Republicans in the House vote 'no', just a couple McCains in the Senate will bless us with the latest in nanny-state bullshit.