1. "Enhanced-lethality ammunition" means the ammunition that licensees may not sell, lease or otherwise transfer under Police Code Sec. 613.10(g).
2. Enhanced-lethality ammunition is designed to tear larger wounds in the body by flattening and increasing in diameter on impact and/or exploding and dispersing shrapnel throughout the body. These design features increase the likelihood that the bullet will hit a major artery or organ, that it will take a more circuitous path through the body to create more widespread damage, and that it will release all of its propulsive force inside the body to cause maximum injury. Accordingly, enhanced-lethality ammunition is more likely to cause severe injury and death than is conventional ammunition that does not flatten or fragment upon impact.
3. Enhanced-lethality ammunition has been used in shooting massacres both in San Francisco and abroad. On July 1, 1993, heavily armed gunman Gian Luigi Ferri shot and killed eight people, then himself, in the 101 California Street high-rise in San Francisco using hollow-point bullets. Most recently, on July 24, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik used lethality-enhanced bullets designed to fragment inside the body and cause maximum internal damage to kill and grievously wound dozens of children at a youth camp in Norway.
4. Banning the sale of enhanced-lethality ammunition in San Francisco does not substantially burden the right of self defense. The right to use firearms in self defense can be fully exercised using conventional, non-collapsing, non-fragmenting ammunition. Enhanced-lethality ammunition is not in general use, and this unusually injurious ammunition has been banned outside the United States. For example, the Hague Convention of 1899, Declaration III, has for more than a century prohibited the use in warfare of bullets that easily expand or flatten in the body.
5. Personal firearms kept in the home are more likely to be used against family and friends than intruders. Home firearms may also be used in suicide attempts, accidental shootings and criminal assaults.
6. The City and County of San Francisco has a legitimate, important and compelling governmental interest in reducing the likelihood that shooting victims in San Francisco will die of their injuries by reducing the lethality of the ammunition sold and used in the City and County of San Francisco.
(Added by Ord. 206-11
, File No. 110901, App. 10/11/2011, Eff. 11/10/2011)