John Lott’s newest piece at Fox News starts this way:
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 rest of the piece is available here.
Here is an interview that John Lott had with Steve Gruber on the Michigan Talk Network on Tuesday, March 10, 2015 from 6:35 to 7:00 AM.
Here is an interview that John Lott had on World Radio (Tuesday, March 10, 2015).
UPDATE: The issue may not be going away for long as seen by this editorial in the Washington Post.
ATF hasn’t withdrawn its proposal. It says it needs more time to evaluate the public comments that it has received and to study some substantive issues raised in them. The agency, however, won’t specify what those issues are. Once it processes the blowback, it should defend its sensible position.
The proposed ban on certain armor-piercing bullets won’t end gun violence; background checks are more important. It’s not even the important gun-related issue on the table at the moment; significant gun legislation is pending in several states. But it is the correct and sensible interpretation of the law. That should be sufficient.
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