Ann Brown thinks you’re stupid, and that’s not just because she’s a former chairman of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (motto: “Saving American from Themselves for More Than 40 Years.”) No, it’s because even though you reject liberal gun control measures, she’s sure you’d be A-okay with liberal bullet control measures.
Writing in The Washington Post January 6, Brown called for the federal regulation of ammunition, noting correctly that Obama’s new raft of executive actions on guns had little “chance of achieving even a small reduction in this carnage.”
“This carnage” is more than high-profile mass shootings, Brown explained. “[B]igger problems with guns often go unnoticed: the hundreds killed annually in intimate-partner violence; those killed by kids too young to know what pulling a trigger can do; the 21,000 Americans who commit suicide with a firearm each year.”
Wait, bad things happen involving guns? Why haven’t we heard about this? There oughta be a law …
But, darn it, our gun violence rate can’t be allowed to continue declining on its own, without help from clever bureaucrats like Brown. Something must be banned, or regulated, or at least taxed.
See, according to Brown, the Second Amendment doesn’t protect ammo purchases. And some places already regulate ammo.
In 2008, Sacramento seized thousands of rounds, identifying 156 people prohibited from owning guns or ammunition in the process, while the city’s murder rate declined more than 30 percent between 2008 and 2013.
That’s terrific if you buy the cause-and-effect assertion, but you can bet the next 156 miscreants were a lot harder to get. Brown wrote that, “When someone who may be dangerous is prevented from buying ammunition, any gun he has hidden becomes like a car without gas: a useless hunk of metal.”
Yeah, if you accept that the dangerous guy who had the resourcefulness to acquire a gun he’s not supposed to own isn’t going to figure out a way to get the bullets it runs on.
The same criminal that sold the illegal gun can provide bullets too – and ammo needn’t be sold in bulk. How many shots are fired in the commission of the average gun crime? A box of 25 or 50 rounds will suffice for a number of actual shooting crimes. Though it’s horrible to contemplate, accidents and suicides only require one. And, unlike drugs, bullets don’t get consumed daily. So a black market for ammo needs very little infrastructure (or product) to thrive.
Brown noted that “James Holmes bought more than 4,000 rounds online before his 2012 rampage in a Colorado movie theater.” Clearly, Holmes shouldn’t have been able to. He shouldn’t have been able to buy his guns either, but Brown isn’t proposing mental health system reforms that would have prevented either acquisition.
But she is pitching us on an idea she says should get bi-partisan support. After all, Brown wrote, in California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill banning lead ammunition in state wilderness areas to save some birds. Well, if a conservative hero like Ahnold did it, sign me up!
In sum, Brown is hoping you’ll believe that regulating ammo is somehow different than regulating guns, and that such regulation would do anything to address gun violence. So yes, she thinks you’re stupid. Oh, and she wants you to believe that her old gang of government worrywarts at The Consumer Product Safety Commission can oversee “a national standard” because it “knows that one size does not fit all.” So she thinks you’re hopelessly, droolingly stupid.
