What Heller Means to Brady

[legion]

For all of the firearm owners on this BBS...

The Heller ruling was clear and unambiguos. In the near future, the people of Chicago and Washington DC will be able to legally purchase handguns.

Does this mean the Brady Campaign and other sympathetic groups will disolve and go away? In one word: no.

I believe that rather than restricting access to guns, they will move on to trying to restrict access to ammunitiion. In many states have attempted (CA and IL particularly), these groups have attempted to introduce legislation that requires ammunition registration or "microstamping". Ammunition registration is a scheme where by all ammunition is serial-numbered. When you buy a box of ammo, your personal information is entered in a database with the serial number. Microstamping is a technology that does not exist. It requires every gun to have a special stamp inside that marks ammunition when it is fired. All of these bills outlaw the secondary transfer of ammunition or spent casings and outlaw reloading.

Of course, the flaws in these schemes are numerous. Stealing ammunition to commit crimes will become as common as stealing guns to commit crimes is now. Spent brass at the range? Better pick it up so that someone doesn't reload it and commit a crime, or just scatter it around a crime scene.

Heller does address the constitutionality of restricting access to ammunition--it describes "the right to bear arms" as "the right to use arms". It follows logically that if you have the right to use something, you must have access to everything necessary to make it useful.

[onewhippedpuppy]

They're like Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton. If the "problem" goes away, then they might have to get real jobs.