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Ballistic Fingerprinting for Guns Won't Work?
Posted by Steven Wu on Wednesday, November 20 @ 00:15:47 EST News
As posted on Instapundit, the Sacramento Bee has an article about a study commissioned by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer on whether a ballistic-fingerprinting program would actually help identify which guns were used in crimes. The program would require gun manufacturers to test-fire all of their new guns and then send in digital images of the bullets and shell casings to store in an FBI database similar to the one used for fingerprints.

Ballistic fingerprinting received a great deal of buzz after the Washington sniper attacks in October.

Unfortunately, the study seems to conclude that such a program won't actually help identify guns: using a sample database, the commission found that only 38 percent of the bullets they fired were accurately traced back to the gun from which they originated. Lockyer, a proponent of gun control and ballistic fingerprinting, has not released the study to the public, saying that it needs peer review before it becomes a "final report."

The article can be found here.

 
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Re: Ballistic Fingerprinting for Guns Won't Work? (Score: 1)
by phoneyman on Wednesday, November 20 @ 16:22:16 EST
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Other problems that don't seem to be addressed are:

- what are the government agencies going to do about aftermarket parts such as barrels, triggers, receivers, extractors, etc?

- what about the millions of guns that are currently available without fingerprints, it will take generations for the database (if it worked) to have a meaningful set of the guns available to the general public in it...

- what will the government do about ammunition that is not "fingerprintable", eg: frangible ammunition....

- what will the government do about non-rifled firearms?

Their are far more problems than just being able to recognize "fingerprints" from known setups, which apparently is not very successful at the moment either...

Pierre


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Re: Ballistic Fingerprinting for Guns Won't Work? (Score: 1)
by TomWiles on Thursday, November 21 @ 18:49:02 EST
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There are several very bad flaws here.

First, the ballistic fingerprint of any firearm changes with time.

Second, brand new weapons tend to have the same ballistic fingerprint if they come off of the manufacturing line fairly close to each other.

Where ballistic fingerprinting would certainly be usefull in narrowing suspects and expediting a police investigation (if the weapon is relatively new and has the original barrel in it), it could actually be detramental to an investigation if the suspect weapon has been fired extensively.

Using a weapon's initial ballistic fingerprint to eliminate a suspect would not be wise.

TOM


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