The citizens of the USA wants to keep the second amendment, the right to own and bear arms.
So to lower the amount of killings going on by rampaging vigilantes the US have put tax on bullets where as every bullet sold have a tax of 1000 usd.
How would that effect:
Some side effects if bullets really were $1,000 each, no matter how unlikely that is:
TL;DR
But if you are not satisfied with that answer (I wouldn't be), please read the rest.
First, you should read Don't blame crime on legal gun owners - Danbury News-Times 2007
It says:
Seventy-eight percent of all shooting deaths are drug-, gang- or other criminal-related incidents committed with unregistered guns wielded by non-licensed criminals.
Eight percent are shootings by police or security personnel.
Less than 1 percent are shootings by legal gun owners committing a crime.
Six percent are legal gun owners protecting life, limb and property (homeowners, shop owners, etc.).
Eight percent are miscellaneous (suicide, hunting accidents, accidental discharges, etc.).
Net benefit +5% (gun deaths go down), but the margin of error is probably on the order of 5% too.
You have to consider that some gun-related deaths are prevented when the victim defends themselves with a gun or the criminal fear the owner can defend himself. These incidents in which the presence of a gun prevented a crime are not considered in these statistics. We would have to increase gun deaths by some unknown quantity to account for the increases in death from these. Net benefit -?% (you need to increase the death rate to account for these by some unknown amount).
Furthermore, some gun related deaths would occur regardless of the weapon used. Suppose your plan prevents a gun related death due to a crime of passion. The perpetrator may not kill their victim with a gun but they might use a car, knife, or cutting the brake line of the victim's car. We don't have a good idea of what percent of the prevented gun deaths will still occur but be done with other means. This number is not 0. Net benefit -?% (you need to increase the death rate to account for these by some unknown amount).
At best, you will see similar (97% +/-3%) rates of gun crime. At worst, you will see a sharp increase in gun crime to a new stable equilibrium point. Some of the works cited below indicate the increase could be by as much as 26% (but I suspect the number would be substantially lower). My guess is rates would go up, but probably not more than 10% +/-5%.
All of these numeric guesses are based upon my evaluation of the data provided in the cites in the next section.
Another informative thought on this is that violent crime correlates strongly with certain race/ethnic groups and regions with mixed races/cultures. So the high rates of gun crime in the US may be due more to the "Melting Pot" nature of our country and less to do with the availability of guns.
Also, mono ethnicity countries with high gun ownership rates often have very little gun crime.
and as much as it shows a trend, examination of gun ownership in various countries shows that
The relationship between homicide rates and the supposed measure of gun ownership provided the Small Arms Survey shows that even with their obviously biased measure of gun ownership, more guns ownership is associated with fewer homicides, though the relationship is not statistically significant
Meaning this data doesn't support either argument (guns cause violent crimes or guns prevent violent crimes).
Within the US, there is some data that suggests increased gun controls increases crime rates (this source is highly biased in favor of gun ownership, but also has a reputation for not bending the facts). There are many factors which may contribute to the decline in violent crime rates after lifting the gun bans in Chicago and Washington DC (e.g. a generally improving economy) - so it is difficult to determine how much of influence the lifting of the gun ban had.
Blaming guns for violence isn't supported by available data. People making the argument that guns are the cause of violence usually don't understand that people are complicated. Problems due to the adverse interactions between many people can't be solved with with laws designed from sound bites by politicians.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
--H. L. Mencken
Chances are if there is a problem that has been around for a while and the answer seems obvious, the reason it hasn't been solved is because the obvious solution doesn't work.
All across the US many different variants of gun control laws have been tried and the data suggests they haven't worked. This indicates that gun control falls squarely into this category.
Taxes this punitive are pretty clearly (and explicitly, in this case) an attempted end-run around the second amendment of the Constitution. If there's not sufficient political will in the U.S. to repeal the amendment outright, via the drafting and ratification of a new amendment, it's not a good idea to try to override the will of the people in this way, not even a slight minority of people.
The law will be loudly challenged in hundreds of court cases all across the land, and there's essentially no way that it will survive. If, through some incredible and sustained legal gymnastics, the tax did remain in force, the resulting precedent would cast a menacing shadow on the rest of the amendments in the Bill of Rights. If our government has the precedent for effectively nullifying the second amendment, why not the first? Or the fourth or fifth? "No unreasonable search or seizure, as long as the suspect pays us $10,000" seems like a very bad way to run things.
Taxes that high, if sustained and not ruled as punitive by some legal body or a restriction of free speech, would make the firearms industry collapse overnight. Prior to the tax taking effect, gun owners would stockpile ammo like mad! Most ammo producers would go out of business. Mergers and acquisitions would be very common before and after the tax went into effect.
Also, taxes this high would actually increase violence because $1000USD per round is fertile ground for an ammo black market. The current violence around drug cartels comes from fighting over the production and sale of a very high profit margin commodity. Americans will still want their ammo, they'll just now be willing to go through non-sanctioned dealers to get it.
I'm not sure it would have any effect on illegal weapon sales because now the ammo is just as black-market as the weapon itself.
Passion crimes might go down, but there's a lot of ammo out there already and it only takes one bullet.
Many many militias will see increased recruitment based on what many will see as a move by the guv'ment to "take their guns and rape their daughters". The average person will either not care or will be happy about it. If you live in a city, then you'll probably be happy that ammo is no longer so easily available. If you live in the country, you'll be very upset. (That's a generalization, of course.)
Your question is tagged as "law" and "weapons". Let's start from there...
A law is only as useful as it is enforceable. No government of any world, even a dictatorship, would implement a "law" which would be that "extreme". So, the basic assumption that while it is possible for the government to enact that law, that the government will, in fact, ever do that, is not reasonable.
Further, bullets are only effectively priced because of market forces.... and the competition for bullet-manufacturers is home-made bullets.... it is surprisingly easy to make a bullet, so taxing bullets more, will just make manufacturers use unofficial channels. Which undermines the enforcement too.
Outside of that, though, the law can be circumvented by "traditional" means, like buying things from Mexico, or Canada, or "Amazon.com", whatever. Channels (even legal ones) will open up where it can happen.
So, on a practical level, the law will just divert the sales channels to alternative places, and won't necessarily resolve the original problem.
The kickback for the government will also be impressive.... I suspect an immediate "revolution" would be possible, and the government would be re-elected in no time. Politicians would almost immediately lose their funding, etc. It won't take long for the system to rebalance in a way that suits the population.
So, that brings me to the only plausible way that a system like this could happen.... slowly, and by the will of the majority.
Conceptually, taxing each bullet 1 cent, would be OK, then, a few years later, make it 5, then 20, then a dollar, and so on, until 50 years down the line the price of a bullet is mostly tax.
The process would have to be slow, and take a generation, or two...
.... funnily enough, that system works quite well. Consider your own income... there was a time, in Canada, abut 100 years ago, when that was not taxed at all. It was only during WWI that income tax was introduced in Canada. It was introduced as a temporary measure.... ;-)
The trick is to use a small wedge, and make it bigger, and bigger.
That's the only way it would work, and the scenario you present is unrealistic in any system, not just the USA
People will always seek to avoid tax legally or otherwise. Bullets would offer a massive black market opportunity. Lots of ammunition intended for law-enforcement and military use will find its way to the streets. A lot of black market ammo will be of very low quality due to lack of regulation in back-street factories being potentially dangerous to the user and damaging to the gun.
Interest would grow in high powered air guns and bows/crossbows.
Jim2B's and Doug Warren's answers are excellent. In addition to their points one thing that would probably happen if you managed to pull this off is that the suicide rate would decline. Guns account for a pretty good percentage of successful US suicide attempts. Unlike the connection with violent crime which as Jim2B points out is something of an open question, other methods of suicide tend to not be as effective.
From the answers, you can draw a metaconclusion: knee-jerk legislation fails to do the intended job, 100% of the time. All it does is anger everyone and give them the impetus to seek ways to subvert the law. Along the way, they end up not only subverting it completely, but learning how to subvert other laws as well, leaving you worse off than you were before. The legislation has to have the air of trying to be a just and balanced law, or it simply fails.
A case study in this is cryptography. There was a time in the '90s where high grade cryptography was graded as a military grade munition, and subject to the same export laws. But there's a difference between munitions and crypto: crypto is an idea. As a result of this knee-jerk legislation, we got a rash of T-shirts with the RSA algorithm printed on it, pointing out just how ridiculous munitions could look. I know I heard of (hopefully joking) discussions of tatooing illegal immigrants with it to make it impossible to deport them.
What was the end result of this law? No surprise, the crypto was already outside of the boarders. The math was only written down in peer reviewed journals distribute around the world. Zero foreign countries were denied access to crypto. The only actual effect was an entire subgroup of geeks who were pissed at the government for making their life unnecessarily difficult.
Now imagine, if instead of being a bunch of crypto geeks (disclaimer: I am one), imagine if these were individuals who are willing to put their life on the line to protect the right to bear arms they believe the second amendment provides them.
Oh, and as a detail: the ones you don't want having bullets have been stockpiling. The Obama ammo scare caused a large number of individuals to stockpile, and while many of those were just upstanding citizens concerned for their way of life, the nutjobs were in that category as well.
Oddly enough, one of the largest stockpilers of bullets at the time was US government agencies. Sure, it may just be a correlation of the data, but it is interesting, isn't it.
