From: andy@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (Andy Freeman)
Subject: Re: That GUN flame --
Followup-To: talk.politics.guns
Organization: Computer Science Department,  Stanford University.
Distribution: na
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1992 00:04:34 GMT

In article <1248@abb-sc.abb-sc.COM> ksm@abb-sc.abb-sc.com (Ashley) writes:
>	I recently spoke by e-mail with someone at the FBI in Quantico
>VA. He suggested a method of gun control that makes sense (no not
>banning). All guns would be registered with a balistic test on file. I
>don't fully understand what all this involved, but I do understand
>that every gun leaves it's "fingerprint" on the bullet and casing when
>fired.

Someone competent at the FBI would know that ballistic fingerprints
change, and rather quickly at that.  The change rate can be increased
by anyone interested in doing to.  (Case marks have the same problem.)
Also, both barrels and the pieces that mark cases can be changed
easily in many cases.

Oh, and careful choice of bullet makes it impossible to recover useful
marks from a crime scene.  And then there's shotguns....  (Shotguns
are a hacksaw away from being both incredibly concealable AND far more
deadly than any handgun.)

>but if your registered gun was stolen and then used in a crime in
>another state, that is a valuable clue to catching the criminal. You
>would know that the criminal had either bought the gun from the thief,
>or if it was used again in another crime, say a burgalary, you would
>know within a good percentage that you where looking for the same
>person in each case.

Actually, there isn't a "good percentage".  Moreover, you know only
where the gun started and the information doesn't help you find where
it is now, let alone connect it to the person who used it.  At best it
might help police to return guns, but they already have enough
information for that and don't do it.

>But still it would in a few, and whatever evidence it gives is worth
>the registration and test firing, isn't it?

Let's say that the "fingerprinting" costs $10.  (That's very low
considering that there really isn't an indexing system and testing for
"is this the same gun" comparisons, which is simpler, costs far more.)
We get to pay that cost for every one of the 200 million guns in the
US, or rather, the vast majority that isn't owned by criminals.  We're
at $2B.  (We also should have been testing barrels and there are far
more barrels than guns, but let's ignore that.)  How many gun-theft
convictions or returned guns, which is all we can really expect from
the program, which we can do with serial numbers (even though we
don't), does it take to produce $2B worth of value?

If you want to try "was this gun used for something wrong" AFTER
you've got both crook and gun in hand, you can do so for a lot less
money by testing guns in that case.  Kleck estimates that that will
cut down the costs by a factor of 100 or more.  Is that worth $10-20
million?  I don't know - after all, it doesn't connect said crook to a
crime even if there's a match.  (Remember that you doesn't necessarily
get a match even if you've got the right gun and crime because the
"fingerprint" changes.)  In specific cases, it might make sense, but
as SOP it looks like a waste.

Then there's the experience with registration.  Criminals can't be
punished for failure to register their guns because coerced
registration by them is coerced self-incrimination.  So, the only
people you can hose with this program don't cause problems.  And, when
registration programs provide no benefits, who gets hosed?  Right -
registration is good for one thing and that's a COST.

The problem with gun laws is that there's no reasonable penalty.
Severe penalties are inappropriate for "the rest of us", but penalties
appropriate for us will never be applied to criminals because the
prosecutor has better charges to bring.  If we're interested in
criminal gun use, we'd be better off going after it.

-andy
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