Is this the phone or the pen?
Perhaps it’s both.
The Obama administration has decided to attempt a ban on a popular type of ammunition through some creative statutory re-interpretation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE):
…[T]he Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) is moving to infringe upon the rights of law-abiding gun owners with a drastic reinterpretation of a nearly 30-year-old law regulating so-called “armor piercing” ammunition. So draconian is BATFE’s new “Framework” that it would prohibit the manufacturing, importation, and sale of M855 ball ammunition, one of the most popular cartridges for the most popular rifle in America, the AR-15. Not coincidentally, the AR-15 is among the firearms the Obama Administration has unsuccessfully sought to outlaw.
More here.
May be the finger.
And it won’t be a shock but they appear to have no statutory authority either: BATFE moves to ban SS109/M855 .223 ammo
“Disarm the people- that is the best and most effective way to enslave them.” James Madison, ‘Father’ of the US Constitution and 4th US President
First they came for the ammo.
Exactly why I became a first time gun owner at the beginning of The Won’s first term. To be able to exercise my second ammendment right before the compromising of it began. At this point, I imagine they will have to content themselves with making ammo more expensive and limited in supply.
If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.
Time for everyone to turn outlaw.
I find the historical record chilling:
Weimar Germany ‘regulated’ firearms out of common possession in the late 20’s — just ahead of Adolf.
Soviet Russia ‘regulated’ firearms out of common possession in the late 20’s — just ahead of the Holomodor and worse.
Compared to the random violence of the insane and the twisted, the fulsome genocides and purges of the Leftists were epic.
But, if that’s not enough: when Napoleon rolled through Spain and Germany the FIRST thing the French army did was round up all of the guns. (muskets and shotguns — no hand guns existed to speak of — being limited to dueling pistols — in the main. — These were priced out of the hands of the common man — It took the Americans to put handguns into the mass market)
The Spanish and German guns were easy to find — as the custom was to place them over the doorway.
The presence of the gun rack was a ‘tell’ that was hard to erase on short notice.
AFTER the French captured all long guns — the Napoleonic repression began.
For too long, and too many, this Leftist rampage has gone weakly reported. Adjusted for the populations of that era, Napoleon killed more civilians than Adolf!
The Spanish tell of at least a million dead — usually by hanging — bullets being expensive — during the French repression. French occupation policies were a pre-peat of German policies in Poland and Russia and the Balkans a century later.
As for French oppression of the Germans — it was Napoleon’s army and policies that alienated the Germans from their cousins, the French. Prior to Napoleons chronic invasions and food thefts, the average German was neutral, indifferent, towards the French. Over a tremendous span of history, the only fighting was driven by the nobility — and largely consisted of skirmish warfare around the borders — centered on forts and the occasional siege.
The Thirty-Years War focused German antipathies along ‘communal lines’ and their ire was directed at the Swiss, the Swedes (Gustavas Adolfus), and the Spanish-Holy Roman Monarch.
[ Cross marriages had one monarch sitting on both thrones at one point! The two lands were geopolitically aligned for generations thereafter.]
Hence, more than you might have been told, Napoleon’s legacy was hatred everywhere against the French.
Russia
Britain
Germany
Italy
Spain
Poland
Austria
Even the Americans had had enough of Nappy.
In all three cases of tyranny: total focus on gun ‘control’ — government seizures of all guns — followed by wholesale hangings, shootings, starvation, expulsions, enslavement, ‘ethnic cleansing’ up to genocide.
Napoleon in Spain was, without a doubt, engaged in both ethnic cleansing and genocide. He just didn’t have a train network. His army did the dirty, in the hills an villages, retail.
And in all three cases the tyrant had GOOD PRESS in his home nation… since he wrote it.
Barry Soetoro is a digital tyrant. It’s not for nothing that he’s recently GROSSLY violated the letter and spirit of the civil service — to haze and scare those guarding our polity and borders against ethnic invasion.
With Barry, everything is upside down and inside out.
&&&&&
No better example: net neutrality == Barry’s taking over the Internet so as to shut down scathing bloggers and the global hive of critics.
Is it ANY coincidence that these are BOTH being advanced — side by side?
&&&&
Denial of villainy is an expensive hobby.
Don’t feed it.
Hopefully the Supremes will not allow such a ban to stand. The right to keep and bear is meaningless without ammunition to use in those arms.
As people will no doubt point out endlessly, this move only restricts access to a particular kind of 5.56 ammo. There are other types of 5.56 ammo for ARs.
But it is the intrusion of the camel’s nose into the tent. Others have suggested that, once DHS bans access to steel-tipped ammo, the EPA can ban access to lead-tipped ammo… which doesn’t leave much.
It has also been pointed out that this ban has no basis whatever in actual facts. The ammo under discussion is no more “armor-piercing” than other types of 5.56 ammo… and I have yet to see anyone give even a single example of such ammo being a threat to public safety.
If you have not yet armed yourself, there’s no better time to do so. And stock up on ammunition.
Daniel in Brookline: yep. Better to have protection and hopefully never need it than the other way around. Learn the 4 rules of gun safety and practice at a range. Leave them as an inheritance to your family. My only hesitation would be if you have kids. No firearms in my home growing up, and the way my teenage self and father occasionally fought it was probably a good thing.
Try not to post pictures of your guns on social media. They are collecting a list. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
KLSmith: Right you are!
My older kids all know Jeff Cooper’s Four Rules (plus a recently added fifth: “If you drop a gun, don’t try to catch it; let it fall”). My younger kids know Eddie Eagle’s rules.
In re kids and firearms, let’s just say that I’ve heard there are ways:
http://www.tarnhelm.com/magna-trigger/gun/safety/magna1.html
For those who seek basic information and reassurance, here’s a wonderful resource I’ve used a lot:
http://www.corneredcat.com/contents/
Just keep reading. Kathy Jackson is amazing.
In re kids: find the article titled “Childproof… Isn’t”, and read it aloud with a straight face. Go on, I dare you.
I grew up with firearms. Started with a pellet gun at 6, graduated to 22LR at 8, got my own rifle at 10, and took it to school once a month for marksmanship class along with most of the boys and a few of the girls. Not an AR fan myself as I view the 223 as a puny battle rifle cartridge, but any infringement of the 2nd is not something I find tolerable.
BTW, all centerfire firearm owners should learn to reload. Its cheaper than factory ammo, and you can develop ammo that shoots best in your guns.
And with net neutrality we can now expand the office of people that arrest you for stuff to be referred to as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives and Bandwidth Fairness. (BATFE&BF).
Of course now they’ll need more funding…
Daniel and parker : good points. I grew up with a mom that wouldn’t even let her kids get a cap gun and later never thought I had much need to have a real one. The Won changed my attitude about that. In that, if he didn’t think I should have one then that meant maybe I better rethink my attitude toward firearms. I realized that they are a useful machine just like a car. And that if I could drive a two ton piece of machinery down the highway at 70 miles an hour, I could respect rather than fear firearms.
They got away with banning the importation of 5.45×39 7n6. It has a mild steel core and can be shot in the pistol version of the AK-74. Thus in the eyes of the ATF makes it an armor piercing pistol round and therefore verboten. They’ll most likely succeed in banning the 5.56 m855 dispite all the caterwauling. After all who stands to stop them?
KLS,
Firearms are tools, and no more dangerous than gasoline in the hands of a reasonable person. The left does not like the concept that Sam Colt made all equal. Better an 80 year old woman be raped than she put 6 38 specials into the chest of her rapist.
Most of the rapists are on the Left’s specialized Hollywood and rape squads, currently. They deployed some of them during Occupy Wallstreet to obvious effect.
President Obama Named ‘Firearms Salesman of the Year’
..
It is, of course, a sarcastic title awarded for his gun control efforts, which has sent millions of concerned Americans to gun shops seeking guns and ammo in case gun control legislation is passed.
One poster on the front window of the gun shop depicts Obama as “Firearms Salesman of the Year.” Below the president’s picture are two semi-automatic rifles.
A second poster to the left shows head shots of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. The caption below the photo reads, “All Experts Agree, Gun Control Works.”
source
“There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please use in that order.”
Four boxes of liberty
“Thus in the eyes of the ATF makes it an armor piercing pistol round and therefore verboten. ”
There is no caliber of ammunition for which a handgun has not been made. Any rifle caliber will penetrate the armor used to set the standard.
This guy called in to the Rush Limbaugh show. We can scoff at Hussein Obama’s throttling of the Second Amendment, but this man’s account is chilling: BO is winning, a yard at a time.
“RUSH: It’s great to have you here, Barry.
CALLER: I’ve been telling this story to so many congressmen, the NRA, with no success anywhere. I’m 72 years old. Twelve years ago my son and I bought a large retail store in north central Pennsylvania. We carried everything: boots, clothing, had a huge gun department, looked like a mini-Cabela’s, archery, everything, full line plumbing, hardware supply store. In 2003 to 2008 we grew the business to five and a half million. In 2008, Obama’s first year, things were still going good so we continued to buy inventory, and in 2009 everything fell apart. From 2009 to 2013 we couldn’t buy a box of ammunition, not one box. In the big picture, we’re a small retailer.
RUSH: Okay, two years you couldn’t buy ammo.
CALLER: No, no. We still couldn’t. And we got to the point where we couldn’t maintain the inventory in our other departments when we couldn’t sell guns. We were a destination store. People would drive for two hours to get to our place. They’d say, “I can’t believe the service here. You’ve got everything.” It was wonderful, and then people would call when they began to have trouble getting ammunition, and they would say, “Have you got any ammo?”
We had to tell them the truth. You can’t have them drive two hours and not have ammo. So we told them no ammo, so they didn’t come. They didn’t buy boots. They didn’t guns. They didn’t buy clothing. Our sales dropped to two and a half million. Last year they’re down to a million and a half. We had to have a fire sale to get rid of our guns. We did that. I’ve been relatively successful in business, and the money I put into the store I had to put in about half of my net worth to keep the place going, and it’s been a disaster. I’ve called the NRA, I called everybody, and they would tell us, “Oh, it’s just a normal supply and demand.” It’s not supply and demand.
RUSH: The NRA told you that?
CALLER: Yes, the NRA lawyer told me that.
RUSH: They knew what was going on. You couldn’t find ammo because the government was buying most of it.
CALLER: That’s absolutely what I believe, and I’m living proof.
RUSH: That’s not even a mystery. It started out as a rumor, and remember, people that started saying government’s hoarding ammo and so forth, I remember the news stories, and they were called names, their integrity was impugned, they were called conspiracy kooks and freaks. And here we are, the government is banning the ammo now.
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: When everybody suggested that’s the next thing to happen, what the government’s actually doing is an implied ban by buying up all the stock, by buying up all the supply.
CALLER: It drove the price of ammo through the roof. Then people began to hoard.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: The people that could get ammo — and you could go to Walmart, who’s the largest distributor of ammunition, you could go to Cabela’s, they would occasionally get a truckload.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: ‘Cause I think they were afraid to shut off everything completely. .
..We don’t have much left to shut down. In a poor town we used to employ 25 people. As I said, we’re down to four.
It’s a good thing assassination melee tools don’t require ammo, precisely.
I’m still waiting, not holding my breath, for the authorities to enforce the laws on the books and crack down on illegal guns in the hands or urban youth, aka gang bangers. We all know they won’t, because that would be hard, require courage (not vacuous gassing), and alienate their base. It is much easier to hector, lecture, and hassle the innocent bystanders of middle America, the polite and conscientious folks who have done nothing wrong.
“There is no caliber of ammunition for which a handgun has not been.”
Therein lies the problem, no?
There’s an exemption for ammo used in single shot pistols. Since rifle caliber semi-automatic pistols (pistols, short barreled rifles, and rifles are difined under the 1934 Firearms Act) have recently become popular several other cartridges are most likely in danger of being banned, such as the .308.
So, how is this to be stopped? Republicans? Supreme Court? Good luck with that.
Anything that lives, can be killed, and will certainly die in time.
Death is the only equal solution to mortal problems. Everything else is uneven and slightly corrupt.