About Larry Keane
Lawrence G. Keane, Esq. is Senior Vice President of Government & Public Affairs, Assistant Secretary and General Counsel to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, Inc. (NSSF), the firearm, ammunition, hunting and shooting sports industry’s trade association. He leads all of NSSF’s government relations and public affairs activities as the industry’s chief lobbyist. He is the firearms industry’s chief media spokesperson for all legal, legislative and regulatory matters. As general counsel he is NSSF’s chief legal officer responsible for handling all legal matters including corporate governance, legal compliance and risk management functions. Mr. Keane played a major role in the drafting the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (Public Law No. 109-92), the so-called “Tiahrt Amendment” and several other pieces of legislation which have been successfully enacted in to law.
According to Firearm Chronicles
Apparently not content with its efforts so far to make gun ownership more difficult and expensive for America’s 100 million firearm owners, a source tells TTAG that the Biden administration is taking steps to constrict the availability of .223/5.56 ammunition available to the average shooter.
A person with knowledge of the situation tells us that, more than just “considering” the move, Winchester, which operates the US Army’s Lake City ammunition plant, has been informed that it may no longer sell M855 and SS109 ammunition produced in excess of the military’s needs on the civilian market.
How would that affect the civilian supply of .223 and 5.56 ammunition? We understand that as much as 30% of the commercial market’s sales volume of .223/5.56 is produced by Lake City.
The motive here is obvious. The Biden administration is attempting to further spike the price of ammunition, squeezing the owners of America’s favorite rifles…the scary black ones that the president assures us are only good for killing people and taking down Kevlar vest-wearing deer.
Let’s face it. Even the hapless Biden administration must realize that they don’t have any realistic prospect of getting another “assault weapons” ban through the Senate. Instead, they’re doing the next best thing. They want to make shooting most AR-15 rifles as expensive as possible for the Americans who own between 20 and 25 million AR platform guns
We’ve reached out to Winchester for a statement on the Biden administration’s move, but haven’t received a response yet. We’ll updated this post when we do.
In the mean time, it’s just possible that the Biden gang may have shot themselves in the foot (metaphorically speaking, of course) with this ploy. John Cornyn and Chris Murphy pulled out all of the stops to reach a compromise deal in the Senate that got 10 Republicans to sign on. They announced it with great fanfare over the weekend.
Meanwhile, as the actual legislation is now being built around that deal framework, in crashes the Biden clown car with a heavy-handed maneuver that is sure to further anger tens of millions of gun owners.
Will the ten GOP Senators who agreed to the Cornyn/Murphy deal framework stay on board now? Possibly. Maybe even probably. But the administration’s ham-handedness here can’t be making it any easier for the bipartisan ten to maintain their resolve in the face of a snake-belly-low move by the ostensible leader of the Democrat party.
This is a developing story. Stay tuned.