Boston Considering New Ammunition Guidelines
With firearm violence in Boston continuing to surge, police and city officials are looking for new anticrime tools, potentially including limiting ammunition sales, recording who buys ammunition, and using a new technology that transfers a gun’s serial number onto a bullet’s shell casing any time the gun is fired, said two officials who know about the plans.
Police Department and city officials offered few details publicly, but in his weekly column on the city’s website, Mayor Thomas M. Menino discusses his plans, saying his recently formed strategic crime council is ”examining everything from ammunition sales regulation and bullet micro-stamping to stricter sentencing for illegal possession and trafficking.”
”We want to tighten up how people can get ammunition,” Police Superintendent Robert Dunford said. ”We’re seeing loose rounds, a mix of ammunition. That might be a point of attack for us. . . . When you get the gun with ammunition and you fire it off, then you need to resupply. . . . That can be tough.”
Gun violence is increasing in Boston and law enforcement, along with the politicians, need to figure out a way to address the problem. That is understandbale. What isn’t understandable is the way they’re going about doing it.
Massachusetts already has some of the strictest firearm laws in the country, yet still gun crime is a problem. Maybe this should tell the people in charge that blanket restrictions on the 2nd amendment right to bear arms aren’t fixing the problem and that future solutions should perhaps embrace a different approach. Like maybe analyzing who the criminals are and addressing the reasons why they’re resorting to crime rather than simply taking one of the tools they use in their crimes away from them, which is something that also unfairly punishes law-abiding gun owners.
Put bluntly, in the face of surging gun violence “more of the same” from Mass. leaders isn’t going to do much to solve the problem. Which makes me think they should perhaps go in the other direction and start encouraging gun ownership among citizens. Maybe even offer free classes on responsible gun handlng and ownership.
After all, as Robert Heinlein once said, “An armed society is a polite society.”
(via Wizbang)
