Leave it to a politician to hide behind cops (must have been out of children to use as shields).

Today the administration employed regulations to ban a popular type of ammunition for a very popular type of rifle, namely “green tip” rounds for AR-15s. Their excuse claim was that it would save the lives of police officers.

Having grown-up with cops and having married into a cop family, I found this as provocative as it was craven.

In the last year tallied by the National law Enforcement Officers Memorial, 50 cops were shot dead in 2014. That’s 50 too many, but that is lower than the childhood accidental firearm death rate (69 in the last available year’s data). According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (the same people tasked with banning AR-15 ammo), of all recovered crime guns, 19% were rifles, and some undefined subset of those were rifles capable of shooting green-tip ammo. So far, of the 50 shot cops, at most nine could have possibly been killed with this ammo (incidentally, the BATFE did not list anyone, cop or otherwise, who has been killed with this make of ammunition).

Now, only 3% of all crime guns traced were used in homicides and attempted homicides. Multiply that fraction into the mix and at worst 1/3^rd of an officer would have been killed using any AR-15 compatible ammo ejected out of any rifle, much less the subset of green-tip ammo (it may be popular, but it isn’t the only round of that caliber … by a long shot).

Since the BATFE did not disclose a single cop death from this ammo, and since the statistics show that there likely has not been a single cop death from such bullets, questions concerning White House sanity once again shoot across the political world.