What gun-rights advocates fear — not without reason — is that this is the beginning of a pincer movement, with the ATF banning non-lead ammunition as a threat to armor-wearing police officers and the EPA banning lead ammunition as a toxin. Never mind that there is no epidemic of police officers being gunned down, despite their body armor, by hoodlums carrying AR-style pistols. The use of such weapons in crimes is so vanishingly rare that no police agency even bothers to track them as a category.But they look scary.
There is no reason to assume that this will stop with .223 ammunition popular for scary-looking AR-style rifles. There are multi-shot handguns, mostly revolvers, chambered for many kinds of rifle cartridges, meaning that the armor-piercing designation could be applied to all sorts of ammunition for hunting rifles.
In a sense, the gun-grabbers were telling the truth when they said that they had no designs on our sporting rifles. But the ammunition for those rifles is another story.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/398793/pincer-movement-ammunition-kevin-d-williamson
No surprise here as to what the end game is.