Rand Eggheads: "Gun Control" a Failure--We Must Fail Harder

Convicted felons and other people with criminal records have bought thousands of rounds of ammunition from gun stores in Los Angeles, even though such sales are illegal, according to a study released Thursday.

The Rand press release is here.

Here's what it boils down to: Gun control doesn't work. We need ammunition control.

It's not enough to keep a watchful eye on the 80 million or so gun owners and quarter billion or so guns in this country.

We need databases for every ammunition purchase. We need to be able to track the untold billions of rounds out there.

But we can't stop there.

We need to serialize and register primers and casings, and then track their purchasers. We need taggants in the powder so we know who bought which from which lot. The bullets themselves need to have some sort of identifier. And what can we do to make sure lead is traceable--no matter how many times it's remelted? Maybe something at the atomic level...?

Forget the failure in Canada, where bureaucrats wasted billions when they had promised only millions. By the time we're done, we're talking tracking trillions of individual components, which is a milieu the eggheads should find quite insulating as they promulgate their arcane machinations on the taxpayers' seemingly infinite supply of dimes.

And when they're all done figuring out their system and capitalizing the equipment and writing the software and generating the reports and staffing the agency and lobbying to fund it all--especially since the cost of this level of obsessiveness likely dwarfs the potential gross national product for the next few decades--and when they've multiplied everything by the square root of pi to once and for all determine out how many angels really can dance on the head of a pin, some troglodyte who couldn't pass 4th grade math will outwit the system, throw a wrench in their works and kill somebody with a gun that he stole using black market ammunition.

And the eggheads, undeterred, will pull out their slide rules, murmur amongst themselves in their grant-built ivory tower, and propose God only knows what as their next solution...

UPDATE: JR tells us a Los Angeles councilman wants to be on the leading edge of this foolishness. Figures.

[Thanks to Mike S.]