The Chicago City Council unanimously banned the sale of handgun ammunition within the city limits on Wednesday, becoming the first U.S. city to pass such a measure, according to national gun-control experts.
Supporters and critics alike said the measure won’t do much by itself. Only 10 stores in the city are licensed to sell ammunition, according to federal officials, and bullets can still be bought in the suburbs, legally, or on the streets, illegally.
But the law’s supporters celebrated its passage anyway, saying gun-control measures have to take root somewhere. After all, they said, the Brady Bill and its five-day waiting period didn’t make it through Congress last year until half the states had already passed similar laws.
And Chicago is as good a place as any to try such a novel approach, supporters said, especially since the city banned handgun sales a dozen years ago.
“It’s the perfect complement to what is already on the books,” said Daniel Kotowski, project coordinator for the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence. “It basically completes the law.”
Critics said it simply made a bad law worse.
“It’s insanity,” said James Valentino, president of the Illinois State Rifle Association, an affiliate of the National Rifle Association. “Asking Chicago officials how to deal with crime is like asking Saddam Hussein how to win a war.”
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When it comes to banning the sale of bullets, the arguments tend to be the same as banning the sale of guns. Valentino and other critics said the only people being hurt are the law-abiding gun owners, not the criminals targeted by such measures. Gang members will still get their bullets, critics said.
“They get them the same way they get their drugs,” said Bill Wohl, a spokesman for Remington Arms Co., one of the country’s largest manufacturers of handgun ammunition.
Chicago police don’t have specific figures on how much ammunition is sold in the city each year. But Michael Fitzgerald, spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said ammunition can legally be sold in only 10 stores in Chicago, including some Kmarts and Sportmarts.
At the Sportmart store at the Brickyard Mall on the Northwest Side, business wasn’t exactly booming Wednesday for ammo, ban or no ban.
There was no rush to buy such things as the box of 50 9-mm bullets for $9.99. In fact, there was no rush to buy anything at all.
“It is very slow,” said a clerk. No bullet buyers making that last-minute dash? “No, no, no one at all,” she said.
The store’s manager, Dan Halda, said ammunition sales are a small but important part of the store’s business. And it’s a part he doesn’t want to lose. “Every bit of business is important, and those sales help draw people into the store,” he said.
Illinois requires buyers of guns and ammunition to have a firearm owner’s identification card, issued by the Illinois State Police. Applicants can’t have a felony record or have been in a psychiatric ward in the past five years. And unless they have a parent’s permission, they must be 21.
Halda said the cards are checked three times at his store: “First by the clerk at the counter, then at the register when they pay and again at the service counter when they pick up the merchandise.”
Licensed buyers-there are about 1.2 million of them statewide-will still be able to buy ammunition in the suburbs, but gun-shop owners there weren’t happy about Wednesday’s vote either.
“Did making fireworks illegal in Illinois stop people from lighting off fireworks on the 4th of July? Did Prohibition stop people from drinking beer?” said Gregory Tropino, manager of G.A.T. Guns in East Dundee.
Added Barry Levin, owner of Maxon’s, a gun shop in Des Plaines: “What they probably accomplished is they probably lost more tax revenue, and they passed one more piece of feel-good legislation.”
National gun-control experts concede that local measures like the one in Chicago can be easily dodged. If there’s a city ban, go to the county. If the county bans it, then go to the next one over. Or to the next state. And there’s always home delivery-the U.S. Postal Service excluded-where buyers can get everything from bullets to rocket launchers.
“To be truly effective, we need a national law,” said Jeff Muchnick, legislative director for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, a non-profit lobbying organization in Washington, D.C.
That’s just what U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) has been trying to get passed for about the past 10 years. Right now he has two bills before Senate committees, one that would outright forbid the sale of certain handgun bullets, the other that would jack the excise tax placed on them from 11 percent to 50 percent.
There have been hearings on both bills, but neither has made it past committee. Chicago’s ordinance, particularly if other cities follow suit, could provide the kind of push that Moynihan’s proposals need, said Brian Connolly, the senator’s press secretary.
The ordinance, approved by a 44-0 vote, puts what could be the capper on Chicago’s efforts to rid itself of handgun and ammunition sales.
The city outlawed handgun sales in 1982, then followed up years later with a ban on assault weapons. Two years ago, city and federal officials also began cracking down on federally licensed firearms dealers, dubbed “kitchen table dealers” because they sell guns out of their home. The number of such dealers in Chicago has dwindled to just a handful from 260, Fitzgerald said.
A city can only do so much to control handguns, said Kotowski of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, but Chicago has done all it can.