Reply #12: interesting info

[Romulus]

Which now REALLY piques my interest in how you can serialize the individual round of ammo and tie to a particular buyer.

10 billion bullets sold in the United States alone each year

If you give each individual round its own serial number, that's 10 billion different serial numbers with this many digits to engrave: 100000000000.

http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~2453245,00.html
Under the system, codes nearly invisible to the naked eye would be stamped on a bullet repeatedly to ensure some could be read after they left a gun's chamber. California would be the first state in the country to have such a system, said Randy Rossi, director of the Justice Department's firearms division.

If you keep adding zeros you will eventually run out of room on the round to engrave those numbers!

FW Slack has told us, all gun owners in CA are "registered" somewhere. I read an article on this serialization plans that described how all CA gun dealers have a scanner system that they use to scan CA drivers'licenses as part of the CA sale process. This serialization plan is supposed to piggyback off that scanning infrastructure.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20041006-9999-1n6gunstamp.html
The state's more than 1,600 licensed firearms dealers already have the electronic equipment to record the information – scanning the code on the ammunition box and electronically swiping the driver license – in the same way they collect required personal information for gun transactions

The same article talks about the reloader aspect:
The plan would require putting serial numbers on all handgun ammunition possessed in public, sold or imported into the state. To accommodate law-abiding sport shooters and those who reload their own cartridges, anyone on their way to or from a shooting range or hunting trip would be exempt. It's unclear how this provision would work, with supporters acknowledging that details on many aspects of the system need to be worked out.