Why Ballistic Fingerprinting Is Not An Effective Crime Tool (May 2003)

After a killing spree in the national capital area in October, 2002, gun haters have once again used the Beltway shootings as an excuse for more gun control.

USA Today. The New York Times. Various syndicated columnists. They have all jumped on the gun control bandwagon. This should be no surprise, for gun control advocates feel that restrictions on firearms are the cure for all of society's ills: from stopping murderers to curing the common cold.

Remember how Mayor David Dinkins responded to the stabbing murder of a Utah tourist on the New York City subway in 1990? In a subsequent press conference, Mayor Dinkins said that the stabbing (with a knife) proved that we needed more gun control, such as a national waiting period on firearm purchases!

Well, the latest weapon in the gun hater's arsenal is the registration of firearms. Specifically, they want to register the supposedly unique "ballistic fingerprint" that many firearms leave on bullets or cartridge cases after they are fired, and trace them back to the original buyer of the guns.

Ballistic fingerprinting will hardly ever solve a crime, but it will accomplish something else -- a gun registry tied to the owners of the guns.
Ballistic registration does not work to track criminals

Ballistic fingerprinting will not work to lower crime rates for a number of reasons. Probably foremost is that most crooks do not use valid IDs to buy guns in stores. According to the Carter Justice Department study done by Drs. Wright and Rossi, criminals usually do not leave a paper trail when buying guns. That means that the evidence chain will rarely ever connect back to the bad guys.

To state the obvious, criminals can steal their guns from their victims, or they can borrow or rent them from fellow crooks.

Lee Boyd Malvo, one of the DC-area snipers in October of 2002, has admitted that he stole his Bushmaster rifle from a gun store in the state of Washington. All the ballistic registration laws imaginable would not have linked the gun to him.

Even when bad guys buy their weapons from gun stores, they can use fake IDs or straw purchasers to complete the sale.

The General Accounting Office issued a report in 2001 which shows how investigators were able to purchase guns using fake IDs every time they tried. Of course, this suggests that criminals can easily get their firearms from gun stores -- even while submitting to the background check.

All the evidence to date suggests that criminals will easily be able to get around a registration scheme that traces ballistic evidence at a crime scene back to the person who originally bought the firearm:

* Maryland registers the ballistic fingerprints of every new handgun sold in the state. To date -- despite the fact that thousands of ballistic fingerprints have been registered with the state police -- not one crime has yet been solved with this technology.

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