This past week, the Biden administration enacted new sanctions against Russia for their government’s assassination of activist Aleksey Navalny. Part of these sanctions include an effective ban on the import of Russian-made ammunition until the Russian government takes steps to commit to not using chemical weapons.
Some Americans argue that the actual purpose of the sanctions is to expand gun control, saying that
- the sanctions don’t do enough to pressure Russia to commit to not using chemical weapons, nor is that even something that can be guaranteed
- the acceptance criteria for lifting the sanctions are nebulous, which can allow the sanctions to be indefinitely prolonged (as was already done with Russian firearms starting under the Obama administration and continuing under Trump and Biden)
- Russian ammunition imports account for 40% of the US ammo market, so in lieu of Congress passing stricter gun control laws, this is a roundabout way to achieve ostensibly the same effect
- the increased prices of ammo due to scarcity will only decrease the amount of time people spend practicing or doing recreational or competitive shooting and have no effect on rates of gun violence, and will disproportionately affect lower income hunters, sport shooters, and people who train for self-defense purposes.
I don’t know enough about international relations to judge whether or not these sanctions will achieve their stated goals. But as both a competitive/recreational marksman and someone who generally favors gun control (permit to purchase, making high capacity magazines NFA items, waiting periods for weapons with barrels shorter than 16 inches), I was curious whether the increased prices I’ll be paying for ammo would actually translate to reduced gun violence and ultimately be worth the trade-off.
The short answer is: nope, probably not.
The closest comparable policies that cause an increase in ammunition prices are excise taxes. At the moment, there isn’t a whole lot of evidence as to how firearm or ammunition excise taxes affect rates of gun violence one way or the other. And while excise and prohibitive taxes have been effectively leveraged to minimize purchase and use of other harmful goods (alcohol, tobacco, etc.), firearms are categorically different from consumable goods in that they are “durable”, that is that they last a long time, which makes a one-time tax less burdensome. Ammunition is not a durable good like firearms, however, so an excise tax on ammo might affect some purchasers (sport shooters, people who practice for self-defense) more than an excise tax on firearms, which might more noticeably affect different purchasers (collectors). But given that we know that perpetrators of mass shootings tend to purchase guns and ammo on credit, it’s doubtful that an excise tax on either would have any sort of preventative effect there — and we can surmise the same about people intent on committing suicide with a firearm.
We can certainly come up with hypothetical ways in which price increases might lead to beneficial outcomes: higher costs associated with purchasing a first gun could reduce overall gun ownership and consequently incidental gun violence (homicides, suicides, or accidents), price increases due to scarcity as opposed to excise taxes would be more difficult to circumvent.
But it’s just as possible, if not moreso, to point out ways that price increases might have detrimental effects: the frequency of private firearm sales that bypass excise taxes and background checks could increase, an increase in ammo prices would most affect target shooters and do nothing to dissuade people intent on doing harm to themselves or others who use much less ammo and/or buy using credit, increasing the price of firearms or ammo could discourage people from purchasing for lawful defensive purposes, lower-income people would be disproportionately affected by price increases, uniform price increases due to excise taxes or scarcity could hurt American businesses.
On top of all that, there’s one big difference between the price increases from excise taxes and those from scarcity: the money raised from excise taxes could be used to fund anti-violence initiatives (gun buybacks, bolstering background checks, poverty alleviation), whereas no new tax revenue comes from ban-induced price hikes — and potentially fewer sales taxes are being collected because less ammo is being purchased overall. So the one saving grace of excise taxes is completely absent from ban-induced price hikes.
There’s nothing voters can really do about the Russian ammo ban at this point. It’s under the purview of the executive branch and did not require Congressional approval, and similar bans have tended to get reupped indefinitely — namely the Obama administration’s ban, that neither Trump nor Biden have repealed, on the importation of Russian weapons as a response to the annexation of Crimea. We can only hope that the stated goal of the sanctions — curbing the Russian government’s use of chemical weapons — actually comes to pass.
As for the alleged unstated goal of a backhanded attempt at increasing gun control: in the absence of empirical support or inductive arguments that justify their use in curbing gun violence, especially absent any revenue generation for anti-violence programs, we cannot make a clear case for prohibitive price increases on ammunition.
