Alphecca

A Fingerprint By Any Other Name

How tiresome. Another bill has been introduced to the California Assembly to require something that sure smacks of ballistic fingerprinting, this time onto the spent shell casings. From the Sac Bee:

Hoping to find shooting suspects more quickly, California may become the first state to require semiautomatic pistols to stamp their make, model and serial number onto every cartridge they fire.

Proposed legislation would require semiautomatic models produced after January 2007 to carry the innovative microstamping technology.

When peace officers find empty cartridges - shell casings - at crime scenes, the identifying stamp could help determine what gun fired them and, through an existing database, who purchased the weapon.

"We expect that it will be a very valuable tool and will help solve hundreds of additional crimes, if it's implemented," said Assemblyman Paul Koretz, a West Hollywood Democrat who proposed the bill.

But critics claim AB 352 would raise the price of handguns without having much practical effect, because criminals could simply buy old guns, replace firing pins, or alter firing pins to erase identifying markers.

Sam Paredes, executive director of Gun Owners of California, denounced Koretz's bill as the latest in a series of legislative bids to discourage gun ownership by raising costs, expanding registration requirements or making production more difficult.

We've seen time and again that ballistic fingerprinting doesn't work. It didn't work in Maryland -- in fact, they're thinking of scrapping their regulation. It won't help with old guns, guns that are stolen, guns where the pin has been filed down, revolvers, or just mutant criminals who clean-up after themselves by collecting their shell casings.

This is just another round-about registration enhancement scheme that will add cost to firearms and burden the law-abiding while being ignored or side-stepped by criminals. I could see a whole blackmarket in "unregistered firing pins" springing up.

The article says that Gov. Schwarzenegger hasn't weighed in on the measure but given his track record, I'm sure he would support it.