[edit] Controversy
In general, groups that support
gun control legislation favor requiring ballistic imprinting on all new firearms, while groups opposed to gun control oppose any legal requirement for ballistic imprinting technology. Since the technology is unproven, there are no reliable statistics to substantiate how useful the process might really be to law enforcement.
Claims made by proponents of the technology include:
- Ability to match fired cartridge cases from a crime scene to at least the first registered owner of the firearm
- Ability to track illegal trade in guns
- Low cost of implementation; the technology owner claims US$0.25 to US$0.50 per firearm in royalties
- High reliability; the "nearly as hard as a diamond" firing pin provides long service life
Claims made by the opponents of the technology include:
- Firearms sold to law-enforcement are exempt, which could cause problems when a police officer's firearm is stolen and/or used in a crime,
- High costs that must be passed on to customers, increasing cost of firearms, for testing the efficacy of the technique,
- Legal costs that must be passed on to customers, increasing cost of firearms, for any cases in which the technique causes a failure to ignite primers on cartridges, perhaps leaving a law enforcement officer with a defective gun that fails to fire when most needed, potentially exposing gun manufacturers to class-action law suits for selling defective merchandise
- Poor reliability, as a firing pin is prone to wear, and any micro-stamping of the firing pin could introduce microscopic crystalline cracks in the firing pin, thereby causing an early failure in the firing pin to occur
- Ease of defeating the imprinting, by defacing or replacing the firing pin, or simply shooting a large number of rounds through a firearm. Firing pins are normally a replaceable item, requiring replacement if a gun is used to fire many rounds of ammunition.
- Increasing the likelihood of snapping the end off a firing pin when dry-fired, due to excessive work-hardening of the surface of the firing pin from the initial imprinting of identifying information.
- Manufacturers could decide that the process is too expensive and decide to halt all handgun sales to regions with microstamping in place.
- Unscrupulous individual could collect discarded brass from a firing range and salt the microstamped cases around a crime scene, resulting in confusion for investigators and potentially harassment of innocent individuals
- There's no possibility that this bill would ever cover enough guns to provide the investigative advantage claimed for it by the proponents
- The technology seems to create identifying mark-makers in tested handguns; experiment has shown the actual transfer process to cartridges is much less reliable than claimed by the proponents or the company which manufactures the marking machinery
[edit] The technique in testing
George G. Krivosta, of the Suffolk County Crime Laboratory in New York, did some research on the firearm microstamping technology offered by NanoTag. In his research, using tagged firing pins in a
.22 Long Rifle rifle and a
.45 ACP pistol, he found that very few firing pin strikes actually resulted in legible marks, as it was very common for the firing pin to bounce on impact and strike the case more than once, with successive strikes landing slightly off of the original position and obscuring the original strike impression. Out of the first 100 rounds fired using an 8 character alphanumeric code, 54 provided satisfactory markings, while the remaining 46 had at least one illegible character. Smaller print, encoding the make, model, and serial number for a total of 45 characters, resulting in far less clear markings which were difficult to decipher even under ideal circumstances. Subsequent testing was done only with the 8 character coded pin.
The remaining testing was done using 10 different
M1911 pistols of various make and age, with the test firing pin being moved from pistol to pistol as groups were fired with standard military type .45 ACP ball ammunition. After each 100 rounds was fired, the pin was removed from the pistol, examined, and placed in the next pistol. After 1000 rounds were fired, the markings on the pin were still readable, though the markings were beginning to soften under the repeated impacts of firing.
The last test involved an intentional defacement of the markings on the pin. The pin was removed (a simple operation taking a few seconds on the M1911), chucked in a power drill, spun, and held against a knife sharpening stone for about 10 seconds. Examination of the pin showed some marking remaining at the very center of the firing pin, so the pin was wiped against the stone three times by hand, which removed all traces of the engraving. The tip was of the pin was then rounded to remove any sharp edges, placed back in the pistol, and fired with 10 rounds. No malfunctions were observed.
[edit] Associated legal issues
In addition to the attacks on the technology itself is a question involving other legal issues. It is illegal in most jurisdictions to remove the serial number, or even to possess a firearm with the serial number removed. The firing pin is a commonly-replaced part, due to breakage, wear, or a desire for increased performance provided by a lower mass pin (see
accurize), or to increase safety from inertial slam-fires if the gun is accidentally dropped on its muzzle. With a ballistic fingerprinting law in place, replacement of a properly-marked firing pin would remove the manufacturer's identifying marks on the firearm, introducing the gun owner to legal action for defacing identification marks on the firearm. Sales of used firearms would also be impacted, as a cautious buyer would need to require verification of the imprinting marks, which would require the firing of a case, and an inspection of the fired case with a
microscope, or of an inspection of the firing pin point, to read the marks and verify they match the firearm, since it would be possible to swap firing pins in same-model firearms. Simply firing the gun numerous times could also cause the micro-stamping marking on the firing pin to be eroded away with use, which could also become a crime if identifying marks were worn off the firing pin. A high volume shooter, firing multiple tens of thousands of rounds per year could find his gun becoming illegal just from use having eroded away any micro-stamping marks. Additionally, with $0.25 worth of sandpaper, it would be possible for criminals to deface intentionally the surface of the firing pin in a matter of seconds to remove any identifying marks, which would require a microscope to verify had been done. All of these issues pose serious problems which would have to be overcome were the technique to be required by law.
It would also be possible for someone planning a criminal act to obtain fired casings with markings from a
shooting range, for planting at the scene of a planned crime, erroneously linking unrelated gun owners to the crime scene to introduce doubt in any subsequent jury trial. As not all bullets recovered from crime scenes are intact, which can prevent matching striations, this twist would introduce considerable confusion in processing and prosecuting criminal cases at the expense of innocent individuals.
