New York’s Used Police Shells, Reloaded for Sale
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s attacks on the gun industry
are legion, and familiar far beyond the boundaries of the city he runs. They
were heard again just hours after the shooting massacre in Aurora, Colo., in
his calls for tightened gun control.
So it may come as a surprise to some that in June, New
York City sold more than 28,000 pounds of the Police Department’s spent shell
casings not to a scrap metal company, as it has in the past, but to a Georgia
ammunition store. The store, Georgia Arms, routinely buys once-fired shell casings,
reloads them with bullets and sells them to the public.
The store sells bags of 50 bullets, at about $15 each;
per Georgia’s gun laws, no questions are asked and no identification or
registration is required. It is a transaction that could not occur in New York
City, where it is illegal to possess ammunition without a license to own a gun,
and where obtaining a license to own a gun is harder than in most other states.
The sale of shell casings to Georgia Arms is perfectly
legal and not uncommon; other police departments sell their used casings. And
many of its “factory loaded” bullets, as the second-generation rounds are
known, are sold in bulk to police agencies for use on their own firing ranges.
They are less expensive than new ammunition.
Yet the sale illustrates that no matter how loudly a city
administration protests against illegal guns and calls for stricter gun-control
regulations, the hodgepodge of gun laws around the country limits the options,
allowing ammunition that cannot be sold in one place, like New York City, to be
sold easily elsewhere.
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