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Should We Be Worried About the AR-15 Ammunition Ban?
Conservatives who defend the Second Amendment right to bear arms (among whom I count myself) are raising the alarm that the Obama Administration is trying to threaten the AR-15 by banning its ammunition. Apparently, the ATF has announced its intention to prohibit what a news article describes as “inexpensive 5.56 M855 ammo, commonly called lightgreen tips” because it can pierce the armor commonly worn by local police.
I ask the Ricochet community to explain what this ammunition is. It is only with that knowledge that can we judge whether this is a true threat to Second Amendment rights.
As I see things, the Constitution recognizes the pre-existing natural right of individuals to possess firearms. At the same time, like other individual rights, the right to bear arms is not absolute — it can be regulated reasonably. It seems to me that one reasonable regulation is to ban ammunition that poses a serious threat to the lives of law enforcement officers. On the other hand, I’ve seen reports that the ammunition is primarily used for target shooting, and that its ability to pierce armor is just a byproduct of that use.
It seems to me that protecting the lives of law enforcement is an important enough interest to limit certain kinds of ammunition — if there are no other means of regulation that would be more protective of the right to bear arms. In this context, if there are other forms of ammunition that are good substitutes for use in target practice, then banning this one type of AR-15 ammunition does not seem to me a serious intrusion on Second Amendment rights (in contrast, say, to an effort to ban the AR-15 itself, or all ammunition that would be used by AR-15s, which I think would be a violation).
What do you think?
Published in General
I think it’s time that more conservatives read founding documents like the Boston Pamphlet by Samuel Adams to understand just how radical, and revolutionary, our founding fathers were.
A recognized right to keep and bear arms is only of any use if the people have the tools necessary to do the harsh work of making war, when the time comes for killing. The banning of armor piercing munitions may sound reasonable with no context for why the protections exist, but when you pause to consider that Amendment II protections exist to protect the common man and his family from power hungry murderers and liars who refuse to be bound by the laws intended to protect the rights of the people, then the term ‘reasonable’ takes a different meaning.
These ammunition restrictions are akin to a poll tax.
Georgia Carry has provided an excellent summary of the unlawfulness of the ATF action. See the linked story at GunsSaveLives.net:
http://gunssavelives.net/blog/gun-laws/georgia-gun-rights-group-tears-apart-atfs-proposed-m855-ban-with-their-comments/?utm_source=Guns+Save+Lives+Daily+Mailing+List&utm_campaign=e5ff5225c2-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_eaeaa815c4-e5ff5225c2-65816005
Jeff, let me be quite frank here. You are absolutely playing to the game of the gun banners. The 2nd amendment is NOT about your duck hunting and what affects it. First understand, the term “armor piercing” has been shown here repeatedly to be an arbitrary definition. By the standard of the law, if the police regularly wore paper sacks with the word armor written in crayon, the feds could argue your shotgun fires armor piercing cop killer shot. So Set aside the nonsense of whether the fed is justified in banning armor piercing, the term is fluid and subject to the caprice of the BATFE- rule of man, not rule of law.
Secondly, Your remark about how “no hunter needs a bullet that…” misses the intent of the second amendment. It is more than about hunting, and while I understand that many hunters do not like modern rifles, it seems that every time the Dems want to take away more guns there is some group of hunters out there supporting them. The wounds are raw on this one, because every time the Dems move they claim, “well, of course we will leave your hunting guns alone… for now.” Divide and conquer. But if you spurn the youth of today with their autos, hunting and hunters will continue to diminish
Thirdly, regarding whether and how there even should be limits, the term “arms” had an understood definition to the founders, and that term was distinct from “ordnance”. Arms were any weapon that soldiers would carry for their own use, be they muskets, knives, etc. Applying that definition today should legally justify anyone owning an M4 carbine and the ammo to use it, regardless of its construction. The 2nd can be argued to not apply to explosives, cannon, etc., as those are clearly ordnance. Beyond that, there really is no Constitutional limit, regardless of the tech. The 2nd is there to provide for the national defense, home defense, and a guard against tyranny. That means we should be allowed to arm ourselves with whatever is currently out there.
As to the notion that “the founders never envisioned [insert technology],” Lewis and Clark took a 20 round capacity Girandoni rifle on their famous expedition: a fantastic advancement that allowed the shooter to chamber a new round instantly. In other words, during the Presidency of the man who wrote the Declaration of Indepdence, there were already antique prededessors to today’s much-maligned rifles.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girandoni_Air_Rifle
I second Skipsul in being wary of the Left’s divide and conquer strategy on guns. They love trotting out hunters or outdoorsman who know nothing of modern intermediate rifles to advance their cause. It’s with some justification that the avid gun culture holds the skeet-shooting gentry in some suspicion.
Divide and Conquer is exactly right. Why is the government even doing this, when there are no reports of criminals using this ammunition to kill bullet-proof vest-wearing cops? Because they can’t pass restrictions that disarm or make the lives difficult of 10s of millions of gun owners at once. So they’ve got to take a bite here and a bite there. Don’t doubt this, duck hunters, your day will come. Some day some lunatic will use the shotgun he stole from a relative to kill some school children and it will be your bird gun that the left will want to ban.
This is excellent but doesn’t go quite far enough.
The distinction between “arms” and “ordnance” was not one the Founders made, vis a vis 2A. Note that in those times citizens owned and used cannon without anyone’s “permission”. Privateers regularly were outfitted with what cannon could be bought, and no government monies were used for such purpose. During the Revolutionary War numerous cannon were privately owned and used by the American armies. “Arms” are simply “arms” – whatever weapon one wishes to consider.
What is really galling here is the whole classification of “armor piercing”. If we were talking about HEAT or HEP-T rounds, I could get behind a discussion of armor piercing. Additional layers of clothing worn by police officers – and others when need arises (I wore such for over a year in Iowa) – are hardly “armor”. At best they are “bullet resistant”. As has been noted here several times by several authors, there are many, many rounds that can pierce the bullet resistant clothing worn by some police.
The blatant idiocy of this ruling is also seriously galling. This is a round that has been fired millions of times in AR rifles around the nation. Not one single episode of use of this round to specifically, or unintentionally, pierce a police vest is in evidence. Not ONE. Yet we are to believe that now that you can place this round in a “pistol” – with half the barrel length of even the carbine AR and monstrously long by any standard – has become a “hazard” to LEO’s. It is sad that the government has gotten to where it no longer truly worries about citizens and rights and simply rules because it has the power or has usurped the power.
The solution to this problem is to simply erase this whole category of “armor piercing” ammo. It is yet another silly thing to argue over. ALL ammunition is armor piercing, depending on how you formulate it or define armor. The standard rifle of George A. Custer at Little Big Horn in 1876 (a .45-70) using a 450 gr linotype cast bullet can neatly pierce 1/4″ steel plate. My friend in Rockford has a plate of steel to prove it.
It is time to stop our government from “defining” our rights away.
John,
I’m sure others have covered this, but I’ll weigh in as well. ALL rifle rounds can pierce soft body armor. 556 ammo not covered by this ban pierces it just as easily.
The law that the ATF is citing to justify this ban is designed to cover handgun ammo. A steel core in a hand gun round could penetrate soft body armor that the round otherwise might not.
The trick the ATF is playing is that they classify several types of rifles as “handguns”, if they have no stock, and a short barrel. If you’ve ever fired one of these, you know how silly that description is.
Since some rifle rounds can be fired out of guns that the ATF calls handguns, they have extended the law to cover ammunition that the co-sponsors of the original law went on record as saying would never be covered by it. To reiterate, the ammunition is no more armor piercing than any rifle round.
Unless you propose banning all rifle rounds, it makes no sense to ban the green tip 556.
Much of this idiocy stems from the ATF’s defining what an “AR pistol” is. It IS no different than an AR-15 rifle save for not having a stock and having a shorter barrel. The physics and ballistics of the rifle round remains the same. But we call it a “pistol” because that’s what the ATF calls it.
Funny that nobody has mentioned this: A primary element of ATF’s argument is based on the idea that a particular round can be fired from a handgun. Handguns have been built to fire all sorts of “rifle” rounds. Heck, you could easily build something that would fit the definition of a handgun that could fire .50 BMG. Thompson Center makes a line of handguns that will accept pretty much any “rifle” cartridge made. So… just what cartridge isn’t ripe for banning?
Actually this was covered earlier by several others, including me.
Ah, my apologies, Skip and others. That’s what I get for speed reading on a tablet.
Nobody should be foolish enough to ignore the liberals’ stated goals of banning all firearms for common people. The only motivation for going after ammunition has been their frustration in trying to ban firearms themselves, altogether.
“¿Armas? ¿Para que?” – a famous politician.