‘Ammunition Accountability’ is a fraud
1/30/2009
Will the world as you know it end on June 30?
Not exactly, but there is a measure of truth to the Chicken Little message. AmmunitionAccountability.org does exist, and it is indeed pushing, in 18 states, a nasty bit of boilerplate legislation which would:
- Require all ammunition sold to be “microstamped” with bullets and cases serialized for identification;
- Require eventual forfeiture of non-serialized ammunition;
- End reloading; and
- Produce enormous increases in ammunition costs.
Who’s behind ammunitionaccountability.org?
When the e-mail started pouring in, our legal director for Grass Roots North Carolina, patent lawyer Ed Green looked into it and discovered that in 2006, Steve Mace and Russell Ford were issued U.S. Patent No. 7,143,697 for “Apparatus and method for identifying ammunition.”
According to Gun Week, Mace and Ford spent $200,000 on their “microstamping” technology, but were unable to sell it to ammunition-makers. Their solution? To legislate the use of their brainchild.
The intrepid inventors, together with business partner John Knickerbocker, hired lobbying firm Gordon, Thomas and Honeywell and, starting with Washington state, began pushing microstamping legislation across the country.
Among life’s little jokes, Ford claims to be pro-gun (“with friends like these…”). “An armed society is a polite society,” Ford is quoted as saying to The Seattle Weekly. The most polite society of all, it seems, is one which funnels its money into the pockets of Messieurs Mace and Ford.
Although their web site appears to be a gun control organization (the “.org” was a nice touch, don’t you think?), in reality it is a front for their company, Ammunition Coding System.
Harold
