Ballistic Fingerprinting

A state system requiring the ballistics ?fingerprinting? of new handguns sold in New York has cost taxpayers millions while doing nothing to solve crimes, a federal lawsuit contends.

The lawsuit challenges the state CoBIS, or Combined Ballistic Identification System, which requires that most new handguns sold in the state be test fired so the state can file specific ballistics information into a database. CoBIS has cost the state more than $12 million and ?since inception, not one crime has been solved using the system,? the lawsuit alleges.

It should be interesting to watch this case.

The National Rifle Association has two activism opportunities for you. The first concerns serial numbers on ammunition:

Anti-gun legislation, Senate Bill 357, is expected to be heard in the Assembly Public Safety Committee on Tuesday, June 28. Recently amended, this bill requires that all handgun ammunition carry a unique serial number engraved on both the bullet and the case and be registered to the purchaser. SB 357 bans the manufacture, transfer, and possession of non-serialized handgun ammunition after July 1, 2009, and possession of non-serialized ammunition would be a crime. SB 357 would also require ammunition vendors and manufacturers to register with the Department of Justice. Please contact members of the Committee and ask them to oppose SB 357.

The second concerns microstamping:

Assembly Bill 352 is expected to be considered by the Senate Public Safety Committee on Tuesday, June 28.  AB 352 expands the definition of "unsafe handguns" to include semi-automatic pistols that are not designed and equipped with an array of microscopic characters which identify the make, model, and serial number of the pistol by imprinting the characters on each cartridge case when the firearm is discharged. This legislation could essentially ban all semi-automatic pistols commonly used by California gun owners. Please contact members of the Senate Public Safety Committee and ask them to oppose AB 352.

What's going on with both bills is simple.  The California legislators have learned that current technology is insufficient to effectively "fingerprint" all firearms without making changes to the firearm itself to aid the process.  Thus, they are determined to mandate those changes -- without bothering to see if they will work -- in an effort to increase the cost of both handguns and ammunition to levels out of reach of the common man.  Diane Feinstein will still be able to afford her handgun and ammunition, of course. 

The NRA tells you who to contact to stop these bills.  I'll tell you why. 

There is no evidence to suggest that either serial numbers or microstamping will survive wear and tear on the firearm or the impact of the bullet on its target.  Even if it did do so, criminals do not buy guns legally and will not be registered as the purchaser of either the firearm or the ammunition they use to commit a crime.  There are millions of firearms and quite possibly billions of rounds of ammunition in California that do not comply with these laws. 

Law-abiding gun owners who decide to comply with these laws would be forced to provide identification -- possibly including a fingerprint -- with every ammunition purchase; the massive recordkeeping necessitated by such measures would be extremely expensive in a state already near financial collapse.  Manufacturers would be forced to either stop selling ammunition and handguns in California, or increase their prices significantly to pay for the retooling necessary. 

Now... you have some phone calls to make.

When the "bullet serial number" proposal first started making the rounds in California, I noted that the Governator of that state had recently vetoed a bill calling for a tax on ammunition of about  $.10 per bullet (that's a $50 tax on a single, 500-round box of .22 -- more than doubling the price), along with another bill requiring all ammunition purchasers to be registered and fingerprinted. 

This bullet serial number nonsense is the same damn thing, except that they've figured out that they have to offer some  justification for the hassle, privacy invasion, and cost increases on ammunition that they want to create.  Aside from the usual gun control voodoo, that is, since no one believes them anymore. 

Do you doubt my analysis?  Here's one of the requirements of the bill:

Ammunition dealers would be required to log their sales, creating a database that would allow police to track any bullet to the person who bought it.

Same damn thing.  Registered, fingerprinted, traceable, assuming you aren't a criminal and don't buy your ammunition across a state line somewhere.

In addition, on behalf of ammunition manufacturers, Congressman Duncan Hunter, R-San Diego, wrote to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger warning that if the bill became law it would have such an adverse effect on the industry that it would diminish the nation's ability to provide homeland security.

The Connecticut-based Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute argues the serialization requirement would mean hundreds of millions of dollars in new investment. In a statement, the institute said the proposal "would effectively ban firearms recreation by law-abiding citizens as costs rise from pennies to dollars per cartridge."

In an April letter to Schwarz-enegger, Remington President and CEO Thomas Millner wrote that his company, which produces about 8 billion rounds of ammunition each year, would be forced to completely retool its production processes to meet the mandate of the bill. It "would turn modern assembly lines into early 19th century piecework shops," Millner wrote.

How much economic impact do you think that would have?  Maybe enough to bankrupt some ammunition manufacturers?  Sure -- unless they just stop selling ammunition to California.  I'd urge them all to take Barrett's course of action, and refuse to sell firearms products to California police while the bill is being considered.  We'll see how long the LAPD can get by without ammunition.

If it passes, of course, the sellcott can become permanent.  Let California have a taste of the middle ages.

California lawmakers Thursday voted to require weapons manufacturers to ensure that all bullets and cartridges are branded with distinctive serial numbers.

The gun industry said the proposals were impractical and would force weapons makers to either write off the huge California market or adopt practices that would greatly increase the cost of their wares.

These bills have passed in the California Senate.  Because of manufacturing concerns, the two most likely outcomes of passage will be either manufacturers simply refusing to sell ammunition to California, or changing their processes to stamp all ammunition made.  That means we all have a stake in this outcome.

In order to understand the intent of these bills, we have to consider what has come before.  We already know that ballistic fingerprinting doesn't work.  The chances of this idea working, given how similar it already is to ballistic fingerprinting, and the hassles of keeping track of literally hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition sold annually... well, it's unlikely in the extreme that this proposal would have any effect on crime.

So why pass it, and why spend public treasure on it?  Aside from the political benefits, of course, there's another reason: to increase the cost of ammunition.  California legislators have already resorted to the supernatural in order to pass legislation that would have required extensive documentation -- including a fingerprint -- for anyone purchasing ammunition.  They have also tried (and failed, I think) to pass a tax on ammunition... a tax of 10c or so per-bullet.  That adds up fast.  When you can't pass a tax that admits to being a tax, pass a silly requirement like individualized serial numbers that will raise the prices by about the same amount.

It's not about controlling crime.  It's about registering law-abiding gun owners and increasing the economic costs of being an active shooter.  When you increase costs, you force some people into alternative (more affordable) activities.  That's all they are trying to do... eliminate the gun culture by making shooting more expensive.

In the wake of this damning report showing that in several years of operation Maryland's ballistic fingerprinting database has failed to help solve a single crime, legislators have introduced a bill to discontinue the system. Normal human beings who don't like being added to a list of potential criminals just because they acquire the tools of self-defense will rejoice when this bill passes -- and frankly, I can't imagine it will fail after the publication of this report.

Those of you in Maryland: push this bill through. Take back some ground.

When Maryland's state police recently released a report extremely critical of the ballistic fingerprinting program in that state, it generated quite a buzz. It's not often that an official government report calls for the elimination of a government program as being completely useless. Long time readers will not be surprised by this result, because California's earlier study came to similar conclusions. In California, however, they managed to discover the program was useless before actually implementing it. For once, the left coast got it right.

But much less has been heard about the ballistic fingerprinting program in New York. In a move that sidesteps criticism of the program by preventing an official study of its results, the politicians of New York appear to have neglected to fund any studies of their program's effectiveness. (Who would have thought that politicians might seek to escape accountability for their mistakes? News at 11...)

Never fear, though. After Kevin's detailed analysis of ballistic fingerprinting, using material from the Maryland and California reports, a New York gun group has stepped forward with the hard facts. With no further ado, I give you New York's Ballistic Fingerprinting Program, courtesy of the Orange County New York Shooters.

As of January 1st, 2005, New York's program has imaged 88,662 firearms. It has cost the taxpayers over $15 million. It has solved zero crimes. Not one of those 88 thousand firearms has been connected to a crime in a total program time of almost 4 years.

How's that workin' for ya, Schumer?

Over at The Smallest Minority, there's an excellent article explaining exactly why ballistic fingerprinting won't work.

A report by the Maryland State Police that recommends repeal of a law requiring collection of ballistic imaging information "shatters one of the favorite myths of gun control extremists," the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) said today.

In its progress report on the Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS), the Maryland State Police Forensic Sciences Division recommends that "this program be suspended, a repeal of the collection of cartridge cases from current law be enacted and the Laboratory Technicians associated with the program be transferred to the DNA database unit." So far, Maryland has spent $2.5 million over the past four years, with nothing to show for it. The report admitted, "Guns found to be used in the commission of crime...are not the ones being entered into" the system.

Got that, folks? Registration doesn't solve crimes. California tried it and said it didn't work in an official evaluation. Now, Maryland says it doesn't work. As we all know, both California and Maryland are poster-children for gun control.

According to this report, the only thing the ballistic imaging program was "successful" in accomplishing was reducing the sale of handguns in the state... at least, reducing the sale of handguns tracked by that system. As such, we can expect gun control advocates to defend the program fiercely, although they will probably not admit to why.

But we know why: they want to reduce the number of firearms available to ordinary people. They don't care about reducing violence or how someone can protect themselves without a firearm. They just care about getting rid of the guns.

Well, America is mad as hell and we don't intend to take it anymore.

By way of Alphecca's weekly report on the Bias comes this proposal to etch identification numbers into all ammunition (bullets and shell casings). It's a fairly scary proposal, especially since it will (in order to be useful) logically require registration of ammunition purchasers.

The idea is that, if each bullet and casing are numbered, then bullets and casings found at crime scenes can be traced back to the person who purchased them. That person can then be interviewed (ie, treated as a suspect). However, as usual, it's a law that exposes the ignorance of the gun control crowd regarding firearms. Such a bill would not work for a variety of reasons; let's examine the major ones.

First, not all ammunition will have these markings. It's easy to produce ammunition with home tools. All you need is some amount of lead or other metal, gunpower, and a brass case. Most people who shoot large quanities of ammunition already do this with expended factory ammunition (it's called "reloading"), simply to reduce the cost. In addition to this there are large stocks of ammunition already in place for all the popular rounds. Some of that is likely to be around for years even without people making a deliberate effort to save "unmarked" ammunition.

Second, criminals will easily be able to obtain ammunition that may be marked, but isn't registered to them. When they steal a firearm, they can also steal the ammunition to go along with the firearm. Or, they can go to a shooting range and collect the discarded brass from other shooters. This makes it easy to frame someone else for a crime; just drop some of their brass at the scene. Even if you don't have matching bullets, you'll confuse the issue, and there are good odds that the bullet will be sufficiently damaged to make retrieving a registration number intact difficult.

Third, simply enough, criminals do not use a great deal of ammunition. With the exception of murder, criminals generally prefer not to have to shoot their firearms at all. Firearms are weapons of intimidation first; actually firing it draws attention from the police in an urban area, and is generally a bad idea for a criminal who wants to get away with his crime. Even murderers tend to shoot as little as possible for the same reasons.

In comparison, even casual hunters and target shooters can easily go through literally thousands of rounds a month. Those who are more than casual may do the same in a single day of shooting. That puts the costs of the law on those who are legitimate, rather than those who are not. And it means that a single box of unmarked ammunition may be all a criminal requires for years.

As with most other gun control legislation, this proposal won't help prevent crime and won't help convict criminals. It's being discussed in California, following the governor's veto of a "register and fingerprint all ammunition purchasers" bill.

For decades, FBI examiners operated on the twin assumptions that every batch of bullet lead was compositionally uniform throughout and that no two batches were compositionally alike. So if two bullets were found to have the same concentrations of the same elements, the reasoning went, those bullets must have come from the same batch of lead.

In the past few years, however, critics have begun to question those assumptions. Some researchers have found that different samples from the same batch of bullet lead can have different elemental compositions. Other research has confirmed that different batches of bullet lead can have the same elemental composition. Still other research has shown that bullets from the same box of ammunition can have different elemental compositions, some of which can be attributed to bullets from different melts and some of which can be attributed to intramelt variability.

?This is not a case in which the critics of a forensic practice are merely pointing to a lack of research data to validate an assumption,? says University of California at Davis law school professor Edward J. Imwinkelried, who co-wrote a critical law review article about bullet lead evidence last year. ?This is an even more troublesome situation in which there are available data at odds with both of those assumptions.?

It sickens me that people have been jailed or executed on this kind of testimony. The problem with the FBI crime labs is that they don't have to turn up any actual evidence; they just have to look convincing in front of a jury. Once expert testimony has been accepted in a few cases, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: people are convicted based on that evidence because other people were convicted based on that evidence. And yet, we know from such things as the BATFE testimony ("we testify in court that the database is 100% accurate, even though we know it isn't so") that the standards really more are appropriate to government work than a life-or-death matter for the accused.

A database designed to match handguns in New York state to crime scene evidence has not solved a crime more than three years after its debut. New York and Maryland are the only states operating such databases. Federal law enforcement officials run a different sort of database containing information on guns used in crimes, as opposed to new guns.

The federal National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, called NIBIN, has been credited with thousands of "hits," many of them yielding investigative information. Maryland's database, five months older than New York's, has posted six hits based on more than 160 queries, according to Maryland state police.

New York's database has produced no hits from 203 queries.

It's always interesting to read about the failures of the latest scheme that anti-gunners are trying to press upon their "favored underclass", ie, gun owners. They seem to be under the impression that keeping a database of "ballistic signatures" of all firearms sold in their state will result in crimes solved. Two of their experimental laboratories most supportive legislatures have passed laws to create such a ballistics database, despite general warnings that it wouldn't work.

And how many crimes has this database solved -- aside from the creation of gun registration in those states, of course, almost as a accidental oversight?

Well, New York hasn't had a single hit in three years of operation. That should tell you something. We're not even talking convictions here -- just database matches.

Maryland claims 3 hits, which is three more than I'd heard of the last time I paid any attention to their silly idea. But again, those are hits, not convictions. That's a hit rate of not quite one hit per year.

Is that worth the cost? Worth creating a registration list of gun owners by type and model and manufacturer of gun? Worth inconvincing every new gun buyer? Worth convicting innocent people -- assuming they can ever get this far -- because those innocent people had their firearm stolen and used in a crime? I think not.

... that we dodged a bullet by avoiding the California law that would mandate individual serial numbers on every bullet sold, thereby increasing the cost of ammunition for everyone by an order of magnitude at least.