I'm at a loss as to why the government needed to make any new laws on ivory use.
The law from 1978 says that no ivory can be used in the US that is not in the country before 1978 and the owner must have receipts showing that it was imported before 1978.
End of law. Just enforce that law and all is good.
It is actually at least a two part answer. The first part is because those laws don't work and are nearly impossible to enforce. Lots of illegal ivory comes into the US every single day in packages that are mailed, in shipping containers that come over by ship, in peoples suitcases, etc. There isn't much way to detect it and it is really only found when it is stumbled upon by blind dumb luck accident and almost all of it makes it through. The previous laws typically only made a difference if the ivory was somehow accidentally stumbled upon while it was in the process of crossing the border which very rarely happens.
Once the ivory has made it across the border you can all but forget about ever being able to tell it was illegal. There is no real way to tell illegal ivory from legal ivory and it is extremely easy to launder it into the legal ivory market and make it look legal. How so you might ask? There are tons of extremely easy ways to do it but let me give just one simple example. An ivory dealer amasses 500 pounds of legal ivory that he can fully document to the satisfaction of the feds. He then sells that ivory to other unscrupulous dealers or end users under the table and only occasionally documents a sale. So lets say now he has sold half of the the original documented 500 pounds and only has 250 pounds of it left. Well he gets his contacts overseas to ship him 100 pounds of illegal poached ivory through UPS or whatever other means. When he gets it in his hands, now he has 350 pounds of ivory but 100 pounds of it is illegal poached stuff.
If the feds raid him he pulls out his paperwork showing he has bought 500 pounds of legal ivory and claims the 350 he has now are from that. The feds can't tell illegal from legal ivory by looking at it or any other practical way. And when they ask for the receipts showing the ivory he has sold he pulls out sales receipts showing he sold 90 pounds and he claims that the other 60 pounds was lost to waste in the process of carving and/or cutting it up (well we know he has actually sold 250 pounds but 160 pounds of it was sold under the table). The feds have to accept this because there is waste in carving or cutting ivory and they can't prove how much. The guy at this point has 100 pounds of illegal ivory and gets away with it even if he is raided because there simply is no way for the feds or anyone else to tell legal from illegal ivory.
Eventually he is dealing in nothing but illegal ivory as the original 500 pounds of legal ivory has long ago been sold off. And he will be able to continue to deal in nothing but illegal poached ivory as long as he wants to as long as he is careful to never have more than 500 pounds of illegal poached ivory on hand so he can whip out the paperwork and claim it is from that same original legal batch of 500 pounds if he ever gets raided. He can go on like this literally forever dealing in illegal poached ivory and use that same paperwork to cover it and can sell as many thousands of pounds as he wants to over as many years as he wants to so long as he never has more than 500 pounds on hand at any one time.
The existing laws didn't work in America and they don't work anywhere else in the world either for the same reasons--because illegal poached ivory is so easy to launder into the "legal" ivory market and there is no way to tell legal from illegal. The only thing that will work to help cut down the amount of elephants that are poached is to decrease people's desire for ivory so that there is less market demand. And one of the only ways to do that outside of banning the possession of ivory altogether (which they are trying to avoid having to go that far if possible) is to seriously restrict where it can be bought and sold. If people can't buy or sell outside their own state for example, such as was recently enacted in California and other states, many people are no longer interested in owning ivory because it becomes too hard to sell later if they want to sell it, and because the value of ivory is going to drop because of all the buying and selling restrictions associated with it. It is already happening in the cue market as well as other places where people are starting to stay away from ivory and seek other alternatives and ivory is becoming less valuable and less wanted. Less people consuming ivory means less elephants will have to be slaughtered to meet that lessened market demand. The new laws will actually have a real impact where the old ones had little.
The other reason the US is enacting these type of laws is to set the example for China and other Asian countries who need the tougher laws even more than we do because their illegal ivory markets are much bigger because half the idiots over there believe ivory makes their pecker harder and other such nonsense if they eat it or crush it and snort it. We have been pressuring them but the problem is that China and these other countries have been saying "well why should we do these tougher laws if you (America) won't even do them? And on top of that you are supposed to be the world leader who sets the example for the rest of the world." And so we finally decided to set the example hoping that China and other countries will follow suit where these laws are needed even more than they are here. Now when we pressure them they can't point back like they always have and say "but you aren't doing anything about it on your own soil so how can you be telling us what we should do in our country when you aren't willing to do it yourselves?"
