Freedomnomics

Article published Tuesday, March 10, 2015, at Fox News.

Rare Victory: Obama administration temporarily drops ammo ban proposal

By John R. Lott, Jr.

If President Obama can’t have his way with banning guns, it looks like his next option is to ban the bullets used by those guns. Too often, Obama has shown little regard for the law. He does what he wants. If you want him to actually follow the law, you will have to take him to court.

The Obama administration had proposed a ban on one of the most popular and inexpensive bullets for America’s most popular rifle. A majority of both the House and Senate have spoken out against the ban. But Tuesday the Obama administration at least temporarily backed off on unilaterally rewriting the laws concerning what bullets can and cannot be sold.

Embarrassingly for Obama it appeared that his administration had jumped the gun on banning the bullets. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATF) latest "Firearms Regulation Reference Guide," released in January 2015 dropped the 1986 ruling that found the popular ".223 M855 'green tip' ammunition" meet legal requirements. The change made it appear as if the decision was made before the Obama administration even asked for public comments.

The BATF claims the change was merely an accident, but no explanation has been offered for why just this one paragraph in almost 250 pages of regulations was missing.

To protect against “armor piercing ammunition,” federal law prohibits handgun bullets that are "constructed entirely . . . from one or a combination of tungsten alloys, steel, iron, brass, bronze, beryllium copper or depleted uranium.”

The steel bullet tips that Obama wants to ban account for only 15 percent of the total weight of the slug. If Obama was to rewrite a law that clearly states “constructed entirely” to mean whatever percentage he wants, he could in theory end up banning all rifle ammunition.

The administration claims that the ban was necessary because they “must determine that . . . [the] projectile does not pose a significant threat to law enforcement officers . . . .” Still over the 10 years 2004-2013, of the 511 officers murdered, zero officers were killed with the bullets fired from handguns. There is no evidence that the bullets were ever even fired at police.

In order to ban the bullets, the Obama administration would have had to run roughshod over another part of the law allowing exemptions for ammunition “primarily intended” for sporting purposes, ignoring past decisions from Republican and Democratic administrations from Reagan on.

With all the unilateral changes that the Obama administration has enacted in health care and other guns laws, the question is: why is this time different? Did Obama finally overreach too far or too often?

John R. Lott Jr. is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and the author of the recently released “At the Brink: Will Obama Push Us Over the Edge?”

Home

Johnlott.org (description of book, downloadable data sets, and discussions of previous controversies)

Academic papers:

Social Science Research Network

Book Reviews:

For a list of book reviews on The Bias Against Guns, click here.

---------------------------------
List of my Op-eds
---------------------------------

Posts by topic

Appalachian law school attack

Baghdad murder rate

Arming Pilots

Fraudulent website pretending to be run by me

The Merced Pitchfork Killings and Vin Suprynowicz's quote

Ayres and Donohue

Stanford Law Review

Mother Jones article

Links

Craig Newmark

Eric Rasmusen

William Sjostrom

Dr. T's EconLinks.com

Interview with National Review Online

Lyonette Louis-Jacques's page on Firearms Regulation Worldwide

The End of Myth: An Interview with Dr. John Lott

Cold Comfort, Economist John Lott discusses the benefits of guns--and the hazards of pointing them out.

An interview with John R. Lott, Jr. author of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

Some data not found at www.johnlott.org:

Updated Media Analysis of Appalachian Law School Attack

Since the first news search was done additional news stories have been added to Nexis:

There are thus now 218 unique stories, and a total of 294 stories counting duplicates (the stories in yellow were duplicates): Excel file for general overview and specific stories. Explicit mentions of defensive gun use increase from 2 to 3 now.

Journal of Legal Studies paper on spoiled ballots during the 2000 Presidential Election

Data set from USA Today, STATA 7.0 data set

"Do" File for some of the basic regressions from the paper