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From a recent email:
“The bill that is being pushed in 18 states (including Illinois and Indiana) requires all ammunition to be encoded by the manufacturer in a data base of all ammunition sales. So they will know how much you buy and what calibers. Nobody can sell any ammunition after June 30, 2009 unless the ammunition is coded.”
This email is rife with intellectual dishonesty and deception, falsely implying that the big, bad gummint is gonna take away your guns by any means, sneaky or otherwise.
If you actually read the proposed laws, you quickly see that the point is to provide some way of tracing a point of origin for bullets used in crimes committed with handguns.
The assertion that "Nobody can sell any ammunition... unless the ammunition is coded" is a lie. The proposed legislation applies to pistol (handgun) ammunition only.
The claim "so they will know how much you buy and which calibers" is a paranoid slur to create the idea of a malicious spying operation secreted somewhere in the marble halls of DC, and attempts to misdirect attention away from the point of the proposal.
Legislation like this is proposed in response to public outcry for something, anything to be done to enable police to have more clues to pursue criminals, and courts to have more recourse. So the actual "enemy" of "gun lovers" is other citizens, not an oppressive, evil government operating in conspiratorial secrecy.
Nobody is going to "deprive" anyone of ammo. For instance, there are thousands of people who make their own bullets in basements and garages. But these are not the people doing drive-bys and sticking up convenience stores. They are serious hobbyists who take their guns to a range (or out hunting) and compete over accuracy and precision and muzzle velocity and impact vectors and all the fine minutiae that makes a hobby rewarding and worth having.
The point of the proposed law is to be able to trace a box of ammo bought at K-Mart by a 15 year old with fake ID, which then winds up in the Kevlar vest of a police officer or the head of a hapless passerby.
“Any privately held uncoded ammunition must be destroyed by July 1, 2011. (Including hand loaded ammo.) They will also charge a .05 cent tax on every round so every box of ammo you buy will go up at least $2.50 or more!”
These claims are not included in any of the legislation I read, so this is undoubtedly a fear mongering tactic pulled out of the email author's butt in a sleazy attempt to add gravity and credence to the argument.
It certainly makes sense that there will be an additional cost to stamp a number on each bullet, but victims of gun violence are not going to be sympathetic to scare tactics about the rising cost of a recreational item. “OMG! Starbux is going to raise the cost of every cup of coffee by $1.00!!! Be afraid! Be afraid! Be afraid!” No, if that happens, you'll just drink less Starbux coffee, and folks who want to shoot might buy a few less bullets. Either scenario is unlikely.
“If they can deprive you of ammo they do not need to take your gun!”
Folks who generate this sort of intellectual dishonesty aren't shooting up the ghetto, but they are resisting every attempt to legally suppress gun violence in the name of personal freedom. It is a false argument.
The pro-gun lobby could probably be an enormous help to this issue by taking an active role in developing legislation and technology to alleviate the problems that are driving all gun restrictive legislation - criminals accessing and using guns.
On the other side of this issue, people seeking laws to restrict gun ownership and use are just as guilty of their own intellectual dishonesty, commonly using a logical fallacy called "appeal to emotion." Oversimplified, "gun crimes are horrible, so guns should be outlawed." Jim Brady's wife capitalized on this to get the Brady bill passed, after her husband was shot in the assassination attempt on Reagan.
However, it needs to be stated that the same arguments were put forward in opposition to the Brady Bill (OMG! They’re going to take away our guns!!!), but the passage of the bill has not measurably slowed gun ownership. Unfortunately it is also not possible to reliably prove how much gun violence has been averted by a waiting period, either.