SAAMI

SAAMI's roots trace to 1913 and a World War I-era body called the Society of American Manufacturers of Small Arms and Ammunition (SAMSAA), which the U.S. War Department encouraged into existence to get American factories sharing technical data. The goal was basic interoperability -- military arms accepting ammunition from a mix of civilian manufacturers and government contractors, which had not always been the case.

SAMSAA did its job during the war and quietly lapsed in the early 1920s.

Key milestones in SAAMI's organizational development

The Great Simplification

By the mid-1920s, the problems it had solved were coming back in a new form. Smokeless powder had replaced black powder in virtually all sporting ammunition, and the shooting public didn't fully understand the performance difference. Warehouses were stacked with over 4,000 different shotshell loads and 350 centerfire rifle and pistol loads -- many of them redundant, obsolete, or nearly identical under different names.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Commerce was pressing Congress about strategic material shortages of brass, copper, and lead that had never fully recovered from WWI.

In 1925, Congress -- acting through the Commerce Department -- asked the industry to revive something like SAMSAA. In January 1926, representatives of all smokeless powder producers, every major ammunition manufacturer, and most major firearms makers met and formally founded the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute. The first order of business was a mass culling of redundant product: by the time they were done, shotshell load variety had been reduced by 95 percent and metallic cartridge loads by 70 percent.

Conservation Leadership

The organization's early decades extended well beyond product standards. In 1928, SAAMI funded wildlife surveys conducted by Aldo Leopold across nine Midwestern states -- work that directly shaped Leopold's landmark 1933 textbook Game Management and established the foundation of modern wildlife management through regulated sport hunting.

SAAMI also financially supported the Clinton Game School in New Jersey from 1931 through 1935, which trained 145 of the first professionally educated wildlife management employees at federal and state agencies.

In 1937, SAAMI's executive committee played a direct role in building the political coalition that passed the Pittman-Robertson Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act -- the legislation that redirected an existing 11 percent excise tax on firearms and ammunition away from the general fund and into dedicated wildlife restoration. That money has funded conservation and hunter education programs ever since.

During the 1940s, SAAMI began publishing firearms safety literature, including "The Ten Commandments of Safety" -- a document that has been distributed by manufacturers and organizations in the millions of copies. Fatal firearm accidents have declined dramatically in the decades since, though attributing that entirely to any single publication would be a stretch.

In 1961, recognizing that its technical mission and a public education mission were pulling in different directions, SAAMI established the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) as an independent organization. The separation was deliberate -- SAAMI stayed in its lane as the technical standards body while NSSF took on promotion, public education, and what eventually became the SHOT Show.

Technical Modernization

The 1970s brought significant technical modernization. SAAMI became an accredited ANSI standards developer and began transitioning the industry away from the decades-old copper crusher unit (CUP) chamber pressure measurement system toward the more precise piezoelectric transducer (PSI) system. The five American National Standards that SAAMI publishes today were first developed during this period and have been revised or reaffirmed through the ANSI consensus process multiple times since.

In the 1980s, SAAMI conducted extensive testing on how sporting ammunition behaves in transportation accidents and submitted that empirical data to the U.S. Department of Transportation in support of classifying ammunition under the ORM-D shipping designation -- which enabled tens of millions of cost-effective small-package shipments. SAAMI also produced the first edition of Sporting Ammunition and the Fire Fighter, a video resource for fire departments dealing with the reality of structure fires involving stored ammunition.

International Recognition

By 2005, SAAMI had achieved UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Consultative Status, giving it a seat at the table for international regulatory discussions. In the mid-2000s, SAAMI launched a harmonization partnership with the Commission Internationale Permanente pour l'Épreuve des Armes à Feu Portatives (C.I.P.) -- the European proof house standards body -- to reduce conflicts between the two systems. In 2012, SAAMI led the effort at the UN to modify the Limited Quantities (LQ) classification for 1.4S items, effectively replacing the ORM-D classification that was being phased out and extending similar shipping provisions internationally.