i'm a bit fascinated by the whole sniper thing going on back on the east coast. i really think that a database of firearms "fingerprints" would be a good idea. the nytimes quotes joe vince, with the atf, who put together a national bullet identification registry.
Mr. Vince said, "We test-fired a gun 5,000 times, and the technology was able to match the first round with the last round."
He added: "But no one shoots a gun that many times anyway. A criminal might fire 10 or 20 times with the same gun."
If a criminal put a nail file down the barrel of a gun, as Mr. Fleischer suggested, "the technology would pick this up," Mr. Vince said. Moreover, he said, the firearms bureau has found that criminals rarely tamper with the inside of a gun.
As for the rifle association's view that the system would fail because criminals steal their guns, Mr. Vince responded, "That simply is not true." Criminals want certain guns, usually semiautomatic handguns, and because most of those are relatively new, the best place to get them is from a store or an illegal gun trafficker, he said.
the number of cases that have been solved using the vin number off of cars and trucks is impressive. they linked the rental truck back to the first wtc bombers with a serial number found on an axle. once a sizeable corpus of guns had been stored in the system, it would really start to become useful. apparently the gun database in new york's matched over 700 guns to evidence left at crime scenes since 1996.
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