Correspondence

Should Ammunition be Restricted?

N Engl J Med 1994; 330:1834June 23, 1994

Article

To the Editor:

Like many Americans, I am afraid that waiting periods and background checks would delay but not prevent the purchase of handguns by criminals. It would be difficult to confiscate all the guns: 67 million handguns are owned by private citizens in the United States, and there are guns in 48 percent of U.S. households.1 The cost of repurchasing all these guns would be high. Confiscation would raise constitutional issues, and in any case, guns can be hidden.

My proposal is to restrict the sale of handgun ammunition to shooting clubs, police, and the Secret Service. A legal case might even be made for confiscating existing handgun ammunition from retail stores to prevent those inventories from creating an instant black market. The costs of compensating retailers would probably be offset by savings in the health care of victims of shootings: the annual cost of hospital services for treating firearm injuries is estimated at $1 billion, with an estimated total cost to the U.S. economy of $14 billion a year.1

This proposal would not result in a hardship to the millions of law-abiding citizens who keep handguns for protection in their home (whether or not such a practice is a good idea) and never use them. Let these citizens keep whatever shells and bullets they have. Meanwhile, criminals will deplete their stocks of ammunition.

I have had a shotgun since I hunted birds as a boy with my father. When I was in junior high school, my best friend was murdered, and his father, the late Pete Shields, quit his job and founded Handgun Control, sponsor of the recently passed Brady Bill. As a homeowner and a father, I still have that shotgun (hidden, with the shells hidden separately). It does not give me much reassurance, and even that I would gladly give up if most of the people with handguns could not obtain ammunition. I am sure some ammunition would be smuggled into the country before long or manufactured in basements, but my hope is that there would be less of it, and in the meantime we would all be a little safer.

Ward Casscells, M.D.
University of Texas-Houston Medical School, Houston, TX 77225

1 References