So, what's the problem with background checks and sales records for ammo buys?

[bossy22]

25. Alot of problems- Mainly because IT'S ALREADY BEEN TRIED BEFORE

well atleast part of it. I'm going to break it down into 2 seperate catagories

Record of sales: From 1968-1986 all handgun ammo sales had to be recorded (requirement was name, adress, age, drivers license number). Mail order sales were banned. It was found that such information was of no use to police. why? because tracking only works if their is a discernable pattern which you can track. Most ammo sales were the purchaser planned to use it for illegal activities did not differ (in amount or type) than regular everyday joes buying for hunting, target, or defense shooting. There was just no difference in buying patters. To put it scientifically, it had 100% sensitivity and 0% specificity.

Background checks: background checks sound good on the surface- hey, we are making sure that only law abiding people buy ammo- but in reality would do very little. The reason for this is that the smaller and more widely produced an item is, the harder it is to track. Essentially all that you would garuntee would be that a guy with a rap sheet can't buy from a store- but that isn't stopping him from having someone else buy it for him (ammo straw purchase). Even if you made that illegal, there is just no way to enforce it. Ammo doesn't have a serial number and you still fall into the same problems as the record of sales- you cannot determine a pattern difference between straw ammo buyers- you would be searching for waldo in a sea of waldo look alikes. The amount of resources that would be required to even make this worthwhile is well beyond what the nation's law enforcement can spare.

The only way for these hypothetical things to work would be to have a serial number on ever bullet. You would have to prohibit ammo transfers in almost all cases unless someone went through a dealer. You would have to ban reloading of ammunition- but the only way to do effectively enforce that would be to ban reloading equipment. Reloading equipment isn't technologically complicated and I garuntee you that if you ban reloading presses, someone would find some other peice of equipment that could do the job just as well. You would essentially have to heavilty regulate the entire metal-works industry. You would have have to treat anyone who owns any peice of equipment that can be used to modify metal (drill press, lathe..etc) as a potential criminal.

Essentially, this process would end up looking like "war on drugs". Lots and lots of money and resources being thrown at a problem with questionable results