Asklemmy

This is literally a Chris Rock joke from the bigger and blacker tour.

https://youtu.be/VZrFVtmRXrw?

That's completely backwards. The people who use the most ammo are generally the responsible gun owners who practice regularly. Meanwhile, you only need a handful of bullets to kill a lot of people, and one is enough to cause an accident. It punishes the gun owners you least want to punish while doing absolutely nothing to address the actual problems.

This is not how it works in Sweden, if you have a license for a gun you are allowed to buy the ammunition for the specific caliber and have at home.

Norm Stamper, former Seattle Police Chief, was recommending this 20+ years ago. Its slightly more viable than trying to get the massive quantity of guns off the streets.

It's not the gun that kills you.

It's not the projectile that kills you, it's the impact.

Unironically, Chris Rock said exactly this in his 1999 comedy special "Bigger and Blacker".

Bullet Control

the key is to put a bright beautiful future ahead of a person, that could be lost if they commit a crime. simple as that.

Pretty easy to make bullets tbh. And honestly I'm pro-gun. Arm the homeless. Arm trans people. Arm migrants.

“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary”

From my perspective both should be regulated.

Isn’t the real problem the frickin bullet?

Terminology is going to matter here. Modern ammunition that you're probably thinking of is sold as a self contained cartridge with a bullet (the projectile part only) at one end, some powder inside a case (brass or steel or aluminum most of the time), and a primer at the other end. You poke the primer in a very specific way which lights the powder which builds up pressure which causes the bullet to leave the case and down a barrel. The terminology matters because in the past there have been attempts to regulate the bullets by giving them each an individual serial number, or by using "microstamping" on the firing pin of the firearm to mark the case. Those proposed technologies won't work because just standard usage of the firearm would cause any marks or microstamping to become useless very quickly, and very often the first level of argument against such a law is that the person who wrote it didn't know enough about the technology to be trying to legislate it.

So yeah you can fire a bullet so many different ways, a rusty nail and hammer will do the trick.

Please don't try this. Firing a cartridge this way without the structure of the firearm around it will cause it to go off in a completely uncontrolled fashion. It's a recipe for risking losing fingers or an eye, or worse.

ammo is much harder to manufacture and easier to regulate.

The person who assassinated the former PM of Japan assembled all of the gear he had from hardware store level parts, even making his own blackpowder. That's in Japan where gun ownership isn't common. Since he accomplished it there it's unlikely to be able to prevented in the US.

The kinds of laws/regulations you're proposing are currently being used in California with regards to 3D printers. They were unworkable crap that invited government insight into everyone's home if that person happens to own a 3D printer, and they'll create a lot of privacy issues without solving any gun problems (the laws mandated 3D printers reject printing anything that might be a "gun part").

You're really proposing mandating a firearms technology level at no better than sometime in the late 1800s which won't work to solve any societal problems we're having now, but will hamper people banking on having them around for self defense.

Maybe consider the problem from another perspective when considering firearms regulations? Also consider that the internet just estimated that there are at least several hundred billion rounds of ammunition in the US. You won't design a process that effectively regulates them all without moving everyone into open air prisons devoid of their possessions, and you'd not be able to pull off something like that without a bunch of said ammo. You didn't get rid of it; you just took it out of one group's hands.

So yeah you can fire a bullet so many different ways, a rusty nail and hammer will do the trick.

Well, there's also the not-small matter of aiming, or firing again if the first shot didn't put a satisfactory hole where you wanted. Or just getting the bullet going fast enough to do damage, without a barrel to channel and contain the blast.

It's not like the whole history of firearms after the cartridge was invented was a waste of time.

You can make guns easy peasy

Ehhh... You can make guns. Metalworking in general is beyond most people, though. And, if you want to rifle a barrel, it's not clear if standard machine shop equipment will be enough (that's a pretty small, tight space for a lathe tool). Easy peasy is a bit of a stretch.

but ammo is much harder to manufacture and easier to regulate

People can and do reload their own ammo. I don't know if anybody DIYs their own smokeless powder, and that would probably be highly illegal, but I've heard of people making their own black powder.

I wouldn't say ammo is easier to regulate at all. The average gun owner keeps several boxes of handgun ammo and 500-1000 rounds of rifle ammo on hand to start so none of that ammo will be caught by your regulation.

If you outright banned the new purchase of ammo it would take years before the effects are really noticed, especially considering the rush to buy up every bullet on the market before the ban went into effect. Afterwords you'd see gun owners driving to a state without an ammo ban.

If you slapped a max limit on ownership, say you can't have more than 50 rounds of ammo per gun, that wouldn't have stopped almost any of the mass shooters in the last 10 years who almost all fired less than 50 shots on their rampages. Not to mention enforcing that law would be next to impossible because you'd basically need a signed warrant to check a house for illegal amounts of ammo or catch them in transit.

If you put a massive tax on ammo combined with a max purchase limit, let's say 1,000% tax and a limit of 50 rounds per ID card per day, it would be business as usual, just more expensive.

One thing that might be worth exploring would be an ammo purchase registry. Gun owners haaaaaate their names on lists aand fight it tooth an nail on guns, but they don't have the protection of the 2nd amendment for ammo. Who knows it might have a chilling effect. Or just drive more transactions through the gun show/private seller loop holes.

I'll do you one better.

We should regulate barrels.

A gun rifled barrel is the only part of a gun that can't be reliably and descretely be made at home. You can make your own ammo essentially from house supplies and spent brass casings. With the upsurge of small desk lathes, CNCs and 3D printers you can also fabricate most parts of the receiver at home (which they now regulated too).
But a barrel however, you need very specialised heavily machinery to make a rifled barrel in a way that makes the gun not blow up in your face or be able to hit the broad side of a barn.
The barrel would also tell you a lot about the gun owners habits. If somebody goes through several barrels in a few years, they are probably using the firearm a lot and are therefore well trained and capable.

In my opinion serial numbers should also be stamped or laser engraved on the barrel not the receiver. People would also think twice before filing off the serial number and ruining the structural integrity of the barrel.
Technically you can slap together a home made rifle, as long as it uses a manufactured barrel it will be somewhere in the realm of precision of a fully manufactured firearm, reliability however may differ.

That's why countries like Germany legally define a "firearm" as "A device that expels a projectile through a barrel". The receiver or more precisely the mechanism of operation is herby completely irrelevant (there are exceptions for muscle powered devices).

This would also call for a revision on the idiotic suppressor regulation, which is in essence limiting the use of a device to further protect your hearing. Instead you either register a barrel with a fixed muzzle device or a barrel with a threaded end and you can put whatever you want on it. The government is happy, because it can assume you are a dead silent killer with a scary silencer, and you are happy because you don't have to wait 6 months for a glorified propane tank on the end of your gun.

Some people collect guns like Pokémon cards. Imagine if you can get 1 to 3 barrels and then 40 different receivers without having to register any of them. A lot of AR platfrom barrels are interchangeable, so you can have as many colors, setups from as many different manufacturers as you want. In the end even if somebody decided to go lulu and shoot up a place, they can't use more than 3 of them at once.

Collectors would also profit since now they can have as many historic firearms as they like as long as they all have a dummy barrel. No need to destroy the beautiful mechanics of the gun to deactivate it. And if they decide to actually fire it for demonstration, they can register a separate real barrel.

Edit: English isn't my first language so I mixed up threading and rifeling. Fixed that.

Sweet summer child, reloading is a hobby with low level of entry.

The practical effect of any sort of gun (or bullet) control would be to disarm the working class. I will not be disarmed under any circumstances, and the vast majority of American workers, convinced communists or not, will agree with me on refusing to disarm.

"Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary." (Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm)

You can pack your own ammo pretty easily

Its much harder to cobble together a decent zipgun or slamfire than it is to reload a casing, not that either are particularly hard.

The brass is going to be the hardest thing to manufacture in bulk. You can cast your own lead, mill your own powder, and refill primers at home in your kitchen.