Democrat officials in Illinois have long taken unabashed pride in the abridgement of Second Amendment rights, and their latest attempt at “bullet control” is again making headlines. While to many it may appear to be a new frontier for gun control, it is in fact a recycled gun control scheme that appears shiny and new among the onslaught of gun bans and hardware prohibitions in the states.
Illinois HB4414, the Ammo Registration Act, would require that “all handgun ammunition that is manufactured, imported into the State for sale or personal use, kept for sale, offered or exposed for sale, sold, given, lent, or possessed shall be serialized” by January 1, 2027. Additionally, the bill requires each round of ammunition to be tracked and included in a government registry maintained by the Illinois State Police. Of course, to accommodate and fund this onerous new system, a tax of up to five cents per round would be added to ammunition purchases.
While Illinois’ latest in a long line of serialization attempts dating back to 2008 has likely stalled for now, it is important to stay vigilant on the continued war on ammunition in state legislatures and in Congress. Even if legislative efforts go nowhere during one session, the introduction and reintroduction of audacious bills like this helps to normalize concepts over time. The legislative roadmaps for all variations of gun control demonstrate what can happen when opportunity and preparation are combined. When an exploitable episode happens, bills that have hung around for years can suddenly move with unstoppable momentum.
NRA has long warned of political attacks on ammunition and “bullet control,” including in Illinois. The truth remains the same since our alerts on the same effort in 2016: The Truth About Illinois’ Ammo Serial Numbering Scheme, and again in 2021: Ammo Serialization Comes Up Again. A mainstay of international gun control planning, bullet serialization is just one more way to add expense, complexity, and surveillance to the exercise of Second Amendment rights … if it doesn’t effectively ban ammunition altogether.
Additionally, NRA-ILA has spent over 40 years fighting to ensure ready access to ammunition for law-abiding gun owners. The Gun Control Act of 1968 originally required ammunition sellers to be licensed and maintain detailed records for all ammunition sales. NRA fought hard to roll back those requirements during the shepherding of the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 (FOPA) into law, which ultimately repealed the bulk of these ammunition-related provisions. Even the U.S government testified at the time that there was no crime-fighting or law enforcement-related benefit to these schemes. During debates on FOPA, the Senate Judiciary Committee determined that these ammunition licensing and recordkeeping schemes were “not necessary to facilitate legitimate Federal law enforcement interests.”
Those facts have not changed for the federal government nor for the states. What also has not changed is how ammunition serialization would serve as a de facto ban on handgun ammunition. Serialization of ammunition relies heavily on utilizing microstamping, technology that has long been debated, sometimes adopted, but often bypassed, even by anti-gun jurisdictions. The manufacture of serialized ammunition would cause massive challenges to ammunition manufacturers that would create immense shortages, cause overwhelming slowdowns in production, and force substantial price increases in the hope that the strain will cause ammunition companies to exit the market entirely.
As legislative sessions remain full throttle in many states, critical work is being done to defend ammunition from various attacks that include state level excise tax proposals, lead ammunition bans, licensing mandates, and limits on categories of “permissible” ammunition, among others. These continuing efforts reflect a trend to make ammunition access more difficult and burdensome through layered regulatory mechanisms.
At the federal level, as NRA-ILA recently reported, the Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act, has also been reintroduced to require ammunition sellers to be licensed, ban the online sale of ammunition, and require bulk purchases to be reported to law enforcement.
As anti-gun lawmakers nationwide fawn over new opportunities for gun control, reality remains that none of these ammunition-restrictive proposals provide any solutions for public safety, particularly the very concerning violent crime challenges that persist in Illinois and the city of Chicago. Instead, they only serve as an opportunity to impress the media that politicians are working to “do something” to fight firearm-related mortality.
Rather than keep citizens safe, however, their main function would be to further restrict citizens’ ability to defend themselves from the criminals who never seem to figure into these “crime control” strategies.
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