After the San Bernardino mass shooting, gun control advocates are pushing to govern monitor ammunition sales with permits and background checks

In the shadow of the San Bernardino massacre where two assailants armed with more than 1,600 rounds of bullets killed 14 people and wounded 21, California advocates have a plan brewing to regulate the sale of ammunition.

Gun control advocates led by California lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom recently introduced a ballot initiative that would ban possession of high-capacity magazines, and govern ammunition sales in the state similar to the way gun sales are currently handled by requiring background checks and permits for purchase.

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“Currently if I want to buy cold medicine, I have to go to the store and show my ID,” said Ari Freilich, staff attorney for San Francisco-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which helped to write the initiative. “But I can have ammunition shipped to my door as if it was pizza ... Ammunition is a deadly instrument and it’s time we treated it as such.”

The notion of addressing gun violence through ammunition limits is not new. Some 20 years ago, New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that regulating ammunition was the best means of controlling guns. “Guns don’t kill people; bullets do,” he said as he introduced legislation to tax ammunition in 1993.

California, along with several other states, already have some laws in place regulating ammunition, as do San Francisco and Los Angeles. But some ammunition laws have faced debilitating legal challenges and other obstacles to implementation.

California’s proposed ballot measure would require that those seeking to purchase ammunition be screened by the Department of Justice to vet them for felony convictions, violent misdemeanors, restraining orders or mental illness. Once cleared, a consumer would receive a permit tied to their driver’s license number or other valid identification. This ID would then be presented to ammunition dealers, who would be required to run a real-time computerized check before finalizing the sale.

The ballot measure would also prohibit the possession of large-capacity military-style magazines that hold 11 rounds or more. While California law currently prohibits the sale of these magazines, possession is not illegal. States including New York, New Jersey, Hawaii and the District of Columbia ban these types of magazines as well. And it would require that ammunition dealers hold valid licenses.

If it is able to gather the necessary signatures to qualify for the ballot, it will go before voters in the 2016 election next fall.

The proposal also contains provisions that lay out a clear path on how a convicted felon must relinquish any firearms purchased prior to conviction and requires owners of firearms to make reports of lost or stolen guns.

“We know background checks work,” said Dan Newman, spokesman for the initiative, via email. “Federal background checks have already prevented more than 2.4 million gun sales to convicted criminals and other illegal purchasers in America. In 2012 alone, background checks blocked 192,043 sales of firearms to illegal purchasers including 82,000 attempted purchases by felons. That means background checks stopped roughly 225 felons from buying firearms every day.”

New York passed a similar law in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012. That law also requires dealers to perform background checks before selling ammunition, and requires the reporting of all sales.

But it has not been implemented for technical reasons. Unlike California, which has a state-run database for firearm background checks, New York relies on the FBI to conduct its vetting process.

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Freilich said that federal regulations restrict that system to being used only for gun purchase background checks, and prohibit its expansion to ammunition background checks, effectively hamstringing the New York law until a new system can be put in place or federal regulations change.

In Colorado, ammunition regulation was part of a package of gun control reforms that led to the recall of several state senators. The state legislature later repealed an ammunition law limiting the size of magazines.

Some strategists in California have said that Newsom, who is running for governor in 2016, could face a similar backlash for his vocal support of the measure. In 1982, then Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley lost his bid for governor to George Deukmejian after conservative voters turned out en masse because of Bradley’s support of Proposition 15, a proposed freeze on handgun sales in the state that failed.

Timothy Lytton, a law professor and second amendment expert at Georgia State University of Law, said restricting magazines has been a recent point of controversy, with the second US circuit court of appeals striking down part of New York’s law in October that prohibited gun owners from loading more than seven rounds into certain magazines capable of holding 10 rounds.

“That would appear to suggest that while it is OK for states to restrict magazines, they have to do it in a way that is straightforward and not easy to evade,” says Lytton.

Lytton added that for California, a legal challenge if the ballot measure did pass could happen “if restrictions on ammunition were sufficiently strong to actually restrict people’s ability to use their personal firearms they already own … then they might run afoul of the second amendment.”

The California initiative is similar to bills that have failed in previous years to pass through the California legislature.

In 2013, state senator Kevin de Leon proposed the Ammunition Safe Sales System, SB 53, which would have required “ammunition vendors to be licensed to sell ammunition by the Department of Justice (DoJ), and submit sales records to the Department which will be cross-referenced with the Armed Prohibited Persons System to see if prohibited individuals are buying ammunition”, according to a summary provided by his staff. In its original version, it also contained a purchase permit provision, but that was stripped out and the bill ultimately failed to pass.

De Leon also tried to pass ammunition legislation when he was in the state assembly in 2007 with the Safe Neighborhoods Handgun Ammunition Regulation and Control Act, AB 362, which would have required handgun ammunition vendors to be licensed and handgun ammunition purchasers to have permits.

Freilich said the current ballot initiative borrows from some of those ideas, but is “much more extensive”.

But Lytton said that simply bypassing the legislature is no guarantee of success. “I’m not sure it’s the case somehow that the debate in the legislature is different from what the public sentiment is,” he said. “There is a sort of relatively equal distribution on how strongly people feel on either side.”