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Ballistic fingerprints.... a really bad idea

by Leonidas

There has been quite a bit of talk lately about so called ballistic fingerprints.

Perhaps a bit of background would be of use here, as some of the people reading this may not be totally familiar with this concept.

When a firearm is manufactured, the tooling that is used to make it leaves small scratches in the metal. Because the tooling is changed fairly often, and gets worn down a little from part to part, these marks are considered to be unique; like human fingerprints. When you fire a weapon, those marks are left in both the bullet and the spent casing. Take a good look at a fired casing. Look very closely, perhaps under a magnifying glass. See those little scratches left on the sides and base of the case? Those are the 'fingerprints'.

It has long been a part of police forensics to use the bullets and spent casings taken from a crime scene as evidence. When a criminal is apprehended, any firearms found in his possession are fired, and the bullets and cases are then compared to see if the machining marks left on the cases of the firearm in his possession match the marks on the crime scene casings. This evidence, circumstantial though it may be, is very damning in a court of law.

This brings us to the new proposals for ballistic fingerprinting.

The basic idea is to take a firearm and shoot it. The bullet and spent case are retained and digitally recorded by some law enforcement agency and are linked to the weapon through a registration process. Then when somebody commits a crime with a firearm, the 'fingerprints' that are left on any casings or bullets at the crime scene would then presumably be compared with the computerized database of fingerprints, and the offending firearm can then be traced.

There are several serious problems with this idea, and I will take you through them one at a time.

1. This procedure would presumably only be applied to new firearms. It will be expensive to implement an effort of this magnitude. Every one of the thousands of new firearms sold every year will have to be fired, and the 'fingerprints' recorded. Who will pay for this? (For a hint, just look in a mirror.) Further, how long do you think it would take for the anti-gunners to demand that his procedure be applied to all of the existing ("used") firearms? That (by one estimate) is over 200 million weapons. Assume further that it will cost $5 for the equipment and personnel to take, fire, record, and return each weapon. That is 1 BILLION dollars (and is a very very LOW estimate). Who will pay for that? (See the above hint). This would probably happen after registration, so that the law enforcement folks could easily contact you. Or perhaps this would happen as a part of registration so that you would actually leave your weapons with the government agency for testing.

2. Some weapons, like shotguns, leave no ballistic marks on the projectile. Some rifles are virtually impossible to recover a bullet from due to the fragmentation of the bullet into many little pieces. Sure the casings could be traced, but just how dumb do you think a criminal is?

3. The ballistics of consecutively made firearms (those that were next to each other during manufacture), may have marks that are virtually identical. Would you like to be the case of mistaken fingerprint identity just because you bought the pistol that was made just before the one that was used in a drug related multiple homicide? Do you think that the law enforcement agencies will knock after supper and politely ask to test your firearm?

4. It is very easy to alter, or remove the machining marks.

NOTE: These procedures should only be performed by somebody who knows exactly what they are doing. If you attempt this and screw it up, you will ruin your firearm, and most probably your body in unrepairable ways. This information is presented only for academic reasons -- to show what a really silly idea ballistic fingerprinting is. The entire procedure would take a competent armorer an hour or two per weapon.

For the Barrel

Take a bullet, and oil it lightly. Now roll it in very fine emery dust. Fire the bullet. Do this a few times, and the machining marks in the barrel are gone, or at least altered forever. Please note that this will probably not damage the accuracy of the weapon. The amount of metal that needs to be removed is very small, and actually this procedure is used by benchrest shooters to improve the accuracy of their rifles. It is called firepolishing or firelapping.

For the Chamber

Take a new casing. Solder or bolt a small rod onto the base of this casing. Oil the casing, and sprinkle some fine emery dust on it. Insert the casing into the chamber, and roll the casing around in the chamber. Only a very small amount of metal needs to be removed. If you remove too much, you will ruin the gun, and your face or hand when you shoot it. If this is a revolver, you will need to do this for each chamber.

For the Boltface (or frame if a revolver)

Take a hardwood stick and oil it. Again sprinkle fine emery dust on it and polish off those nasty old machining marks. Again please note that this is a dangerous thing to do, if you remove too much metal. Less than .0005 of an inch needs to be removed.

Most criminals are not all that stupid. If they are going to commit a crime with a firearm, (and the really smart ones DON'T), they will probably use a black market firearm that is NOT in the ballistic database. If they suspect that the weapon is in the database, and if they care, they will remove the prints from the firearm in the above ways, or use a non printable weapon and pick up the casings.

So why all this talk of 'ballistic fingerprinting' if it is sooooo useless?

Simple. It is to make it tougher and more expensive for legitimate firearms buyers to obtain weapons -- and to backdoor register guns as a setup for easier confiscation.

This is not about crime. It is about control. Do not be fooled into thinking that it is another 'common sense' measure to help legitimate law enforcement solve crimes. Legitimate law enforcement solves crimes through a thing called police work.

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