[Mike Irwin]

"nd if he is selling his reloads at component pricing that he bought before the panic started, he might fall under that."

While neither BATF or IRS has ever assigned a monetary value to livelihood, I think a good attorney could pretty much crush someone being charged with this on a number of fronts, including poverty-level income as defined by Health and Human Services.

Poverty level for one person in the lower 48 is an annual income of $11,170.

If we were to even take half that and say that that figure constitutes a "livelihood income," then it would be $5,585.

That's a damned ton of ammo, no matter how much you're charging per box, and I'm not sure that anyone could actually live on that for a year.

If we cut THAT in half, $2,792.5, is it really realistic to say that any of us would ever reach that kind of level of sales? At, say, $25 a box for pistol ammo like .38 Special, that would be 111 boxes.

But there's also the profit equation. Again, profit isn't defined in monetary terms. Would profit include one's time in manufacturing the reloads, or would it be found to be strictly monetary?

Then there's the issue of whether it could be construed to be reasonable profit. Would a penny a box be a reasonable profit, or a dollar? Remember that profit would have to count towards livelihood, so the less profit you make per box the less likely you are to meet a livelihood standard.

Given the vagueness of the language (yes, that can certainly work both ways) the burden of proof would be on the government to make the case that sales of ammo were being done for business and profit, and I simply can't see that standard being met for a few boxes here and a few boxes there over the course of a year.