« More on Meirs | Main | Festival of Cordite is up! »
More on S.397
ISN reports the bill passed the House by 283-144 (just a few votes shy of 2:1). It'd earlier passed the Senate by 65-31, over two to one. In the House, 59 Demos crossed over to vote for it, while four Republicans crossed over against it.
The report notes: "One amendment would require gun dealers to sell each buyer trigger locks or gun safes for each handgun bought. Another would ban the possession of armor-piercing ammunition. Rand said her group would work with local advocates to examine the "exceptions to the bill" and move forward on the issue.
"The NRA and their followers are going to be very surprised at the large numbers of cases that survive because of the numerous exceptions," she told ISN Security Watch."
Here's the language of the bill, as passed. There may be exceptions which the antis can work around in some cases, but the armor-piercing statement is rather funny. Yes, Sec. 6 says it bans mfr and import of AP (NB--that is AP as defined in the statute, basically bullets whose entire core is a specified hard metal, as opposed to standard military AP, which has both lead and steel).
But that's merely a slight rewording of the existinglaw. For example, substituting "unless" for "except that this paragraph shall not apply to." Then there's an increase in the mandatory penalty for use of such AP in a crime. (Since, so far as I can find out, no one has ever been prosecuted for such, for the reason that no one has ever used it in a crime, this has all the practical significance of imposing mandatory imprisonment for use of a dirigible in a drive-by shooting).
Then the AG is to conduct a study of whether a uniform system of testing bullets against body armor is feasible. He can't outlaw anything, just study the question. And since he is required to consider different barrrel lengths and loadings, and rifle rounds, I rather suspect the result will be "are you kidding?" Unless maybe "uniform system" means buy 400 samples of armor, shoot at them, and write a check next to any load that penetrates. What's uniform about that I cannot see. (PS: if anyone from the AG's office is reading this, send me 400 samples, a hundred or so guns, and lots of ammunition, and I'll do the test for fre... for a modest fee proportionate to the extremely complex physics involved.)