Opinion

Banning .223 Ammunition Will Put Cops In More Danger

Robert Perez Reserve Law Enforcement Officer
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On Monday, White House press secretary Josh Earnest declared that the Obama administration’s pending ban on M855 .223 ammo is a “common sense” measure that will save cop’s lives. The reality is this ban is a contemptuous abuse of the president’s executive authority, the real aim of which is to impose his long-delayed radical gun control agenda by circumventing the will of Congress. Feigning concern for officer safety is merely a manipulation intended to provide cover to attack our Second Amendment rights; after all what kind of nihilist could possibly oppose “gun safety” for our police heroes?

The basis of this assault is the 1986 Law Enforcement Protection Act that banned armor-piercing handgun projectiles. Most of us envision a handgun as something relatively small and easily concealed. The law originally exempted M855 ammo because it was not designed for handgun use. In the intervening years, M855 has remained a very common, very popular round among the law abiding.

Some gun makers now offer AR15-style .223 “pistols” and this is the excuse the administration needed to inflict its long-dreamed-about gun control utopia on America. These so-called “pistols” are not remotely the sort of weapons the 1986 legislation envisioned. To use AR15 pistols to ban M855 ammo is a perversion of the law’s intent. AR15 pistols are neither small nor easy to conceal. They are intended to be operated with one hand on the pistol grip and the other on the forend, which is typical of rifles, not pistols. These weapons are at least two feet long, nine inches tall, and they weigh about five pounds unloaded. AR15 pistols will never be popular among the criminally inclined.

The administration is latching onto the remotest of outliers, the threat of .223 pistols, to bypass Congress and impose its extreme anti-Second Amendment agenda by fiat, and cynically claim to be doing it to save police officers. I am not aware of any incident where a cop has been shot by any .223 pistol, M855 or otherwise. According to the FBI’s 2011 Uniform Crime Report, rifles of all types accounted for only about 3 percent of all murders. AR15 rifles represent a minuscule fraction of this total and AR15 pistols even less. Good faith actors do not let outliers drive policy.

M855 ammo is not particularly special. It possesses a steel tip, but XM193 is just as lethal against the NIJ Levels II and IIIA body armor worn by most patrolmen. Given that AR-style pistols are not easily concealed, what makes M855 a greater threat than any other weapon and ammo? For instance, an AK47 equipped with a folding stock is almost as small, but its 7.62x39mm ball projectiles possess more kinetic energy and will pierce common soft armor with greater ease. So is this about officer safety or gun control? Perhaps folding stock AKs will make the 7.62x39mm next week’s executive overreach.

President Obama has a long history of proposing and supporting the most extreme anti-Second Amendment measures. His Operation Choke Point seeks to cut off financing for gun stores. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 1999 he urged prohibiting gun stores from operating within five miles of a school or park, which would have eliminated gun stores from most inhabited areas of the country. In 2008, CNN reported that he supported a national law against concealed weapons. He voted against the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prevented lawful gun manufacturers from being sued into oblivion for the misdeeds of criminals. The M855 ban proposal is yet another clever ploy in an unrelenting goose-step to deprive us of our civil liberties.

The tragedy of Obama’s ammo ban is that it will actually compromise officer safety. .223 ammo is the most common caliber for patrol rifles. Budget constraints preclude many, perhaps even most, American police agencies from providing rifles and practice ammo to their non-tactical patrol officers. If this ban happens, scarcity will result in officers consuming less ammo but at far higher prices, same as rest of the unwashed plebes. The result will be de facto gun control on AR15 rifles and .223 ammo, but this is merely an opening salvo.

This ban will tangibly harm police because rifle training and individual officer practice will become less frequent. This will necessarily result in an aggregate decrease in weapons proficiency, antithetical to officer safety and to the safety of the communities they serve. The damage is already occurring. Anecdotally, a local agency recently canceled a patrol rifle class due to the high price of .223 ammo. Without this training these officers must do without.

Of course, camera-happy politically ambitious police chiefs, probably never having worked a patrol shift in their besuited lives, will declare that this ban enhances officer safety and that their officers are proficient with rifles. Perhaps, but most state-mandated weapons qualification courses are frighteningly easy and there is a material difference between administratively defined proficiency and actual life-saving expertise.

The media should poll patrol officers on this — not administrators, not desk jockeys. The  result will most likely show that the majority stand with their fellow citizens in supporting the continued legality of M855 ammo and magazine-fed semi-auto firearms in general. If that is the case, then the Obama administration does not speak for police officers; rather their policies undermine officer safety. Apologies to Rahm, but never let a crisis go to waste, even if it is fantastical.