The Obama Administration’s M855 Ammo Ban Is Blatantly Lawless
Earlier this year, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF)
unexpectedly announced that it planned to characterize all M855/SS109 ammunition (5.56x45mm) as armor-piercing and ban its manufacture. The ATF claims that its authority comes from a 1986 federal statute that defines armor-piercing ammunition and gives ATF the authority to ban it.
Unfortunately, the ATF’s claim is nonsense.
Here is the precise statutory definition of “armor-piercing ammunition,” which can be found in
18 U.S.C §921(a)(17):
(17)
(A) The term ‘ammunition’ means ammunition or cartridge cases, primers, bullets, or propellent powder designed for use in any firearm.
(B) The term ‘armor piercing ammunition’ means—
(i) a projectile or projectile core which may be used in a handgun and which is constructed entirely (excluding the presence of traces of other substances) from one or a combination of tungsten alloys, steel, iron, brass, bronze, beryllium copper, or depleted uranium; or
(ii) a full jacketed projectile larger than .22 caliber designed and intended for use in a handgun and whose jacket has a weight of more than 25 percent of the total weight of the projectile.
(C) The term ‘armor piercing ammunition’ does not include shotgun shot required by Federal or State environmental or game regulations for hunting purposes, a frangible projectile designed for target shooting, a projectile which the Attorney General finds is primarily intended to be used for sporting purposes, or any other projectile or projectile core which the Attorney General finds is intended to be used for industrial purposes, including a charge used in an oil and gas well perforating device.
This definition is really, really important when comes to the issue of whether M855 ammunition is “armor-piercing” or not. Interestingly enough, the definition does
not require that so-called armor-piercing ammunition actually be capable of piercing armor.
The definition includes two main parts, at least one of which must be satisfied before ammunition can be classified as being “armor-piercing” and therefore subject to prohibition. Furthermore, each of the two parts contains multiple conditions, all of which must be satisfied. You cannot mix and match requirements from the two distinct definitions (the supreme importance of this point will become clear later). We’ll look at each of the two major definitions separately.
The first definition, from (B)(i) above, requires all of the following: a projectile (or bullet) must be 1) usable in a handgun,
and 2) constructed entirely from “one or a combination of tungsten alloys, steel, iron, beryllium copper, or depleted uranium.”
Is M855 ammunition usable in a handgun? Yes. Although it’s primarily a rifle round, some handgun manufacturers built handgun platforms around it. Is the M855 projectile constructed entirely from one or a combination of those materials listed in the statute? No. It’s made from a combination of steel and lead, and lead is not one of the materials listed in the statutory definition of “armor-piercing ammunition.”
What does this mean? It means that the first statutory definition for “armor-piercing ammunition” fails to apply to M855 ammunition, since both conditions were not satisfied.
http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/09/the-obama-administrations-m855-ammo-ban-is-blatantly-lawless/
