Obama's Squeeze Play on Ammunition

Kevin Williamson of National Review has a great article titled A Pincer Movement on Ammunition that discusses how gun owners are now dealing with the ATF on one side and the EPA on the other trying to limit our access to ammunition.

The upshot of all this maneuvering is that the ATF intends to revoke the sporting exemption for certain popular kinds of .223 ammunition, allowing it to be reclassified as armor-piercing and therefore banned, even though it is not designed as armor-piecing ammunition and has no special armor-piercing characteristics. The reason for this is that the feared and hated AR-style rifle has been enjoying a new career as a handgun. This is yet another consumer response to federal regulation: Some people prefer short-barreled rifles, particularly for home-defense situations when they will most likely be used indoors, but federal law makes short-barreled rifles a special category of weapon that requires additional permits and taxes, and some jurisdictions ban them outright. But if you remove the shoulder stock from an AR-style rifle, it’s not a rifle — it’s a handgun, albeit one of the clumsiest and goofiest handguns on the market. But the fact that there is a multi-shot handgun commercially available for those non-lead .223 rounds means that such ammunition can be banned as armor-piercing, even though it is not armor-piercing ammunition, by use or by design. So, everybody goes back to lead, right? Wrong

Environmental groups have been pressuring the EPA to begin regulating — or to ban outright — lead ammunition under the Toxic Substances Control Act. They lost their most recent round when the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that the EPA lacks statutory authority to regulate lead ammunition, but when has statutory authority stopped the Obama administration? The FCC has no statutory authority to enact net-neutrality rules — that’s why it has reached back to a 1930s, New Deal–era law for justification. You can be sure that the campaign to use the EPA or other federal agencies to ban lead ammunition is far from over. The U.S. Humane Society already is petitioning the Interior Department to ban lead ammunition on public lands.

Obama can't get what he wants legislatively so he is relying on his agencies to do his bidding.  Gun owners have a habit of reacting when there is a direct challenge as they did after Obama's big gun ban push after the Sandy Hook school shootings but unfortunately, when there is no perceived direct threat, we tend to be less attentive.  We need to understand, this is a direct threat.  If we can't buy ammo, what good are our firearms?  Kevin Williamson spoke with Cam Edwards of NRANews in an extensive interview yesterday about what this threat means.