Cheryl Jacques' Bill for 'Ballistic Fingerprinting' of Guns Is Worst

Last week, the Public Safety Committee heard arguments regarding gun ownership and safety. More firearms related bills will be heard by the Criminal Justice Committee this week. In all there are more than 30 bills before the legislature this session which relate directly or indirectly to guns.

Many deal with license fees and who issues them. Others simply clarify language in the appropriate chapters of Mass General laws.

As usual, however, there are legislative plans intended to make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to own firearms. Perhaps the worst of these is S-1327 (http://www.state.ma.us/legis/bills/st01327.htm), sponsored by one of the leading anti-gun activists in the state, Sen. Cheryl Jacques (D-Needham).

It calls for the implementation of ballistic fingerprinting, which would mean that for every gun sold in the Commonwealth after January, 2005, the state would keep on file a copy of a projectile fired from that weapon along with a trail of all the pertinent ownership data.

There are a number of reasons this plan simply won't work. First of all, it's unwieldy. Who's going to categorize, file and maintain the database on all those spent projectiles? Where will they all be stored? These are questions not answered to anybody's satisfaction as yet.

Recently, the issue of cost has become a major argument of course. With the state in what some people call "economic crisis," the costs of a ballistic fingerprinting program have come under scrutiny.

Jim Wallace, legislative director for the Gun Owners Action League of Massachusetts, has been asking questions about the costs. He told the Public Safety Committee last week that it could cost up to $10 million to buy the computers and the bullet-imaging machines and hire and train the staff to run the system. "The expense makes little sense in a year when police are being threatened with layoffs, and other public safety programs face cutbacks," he said.

Then there is the issue of whether or not ballistic fingerprinting can accomplish what its sponsors hope it will: tracing guns used in the commissions of crimes to their owners. According to many experts the answer is an emphatic, "no." The National Rifle Association has long been on record with its statement that this is a thinly-veiled attempt to continue to erode the rights of gun owners.

On its website (http://www.nra.org/), the NRA position is stated as follows: "Ballistic 'fingerprinting' is the gun prohibitionist's newest scheme to achieve gun registration. It calls for every newly-manufactured handgun to be fired and the distinctive markings left on the bullet and/or cartridge case recorded and entered into a database before the gun may be sold. However, unlike a real fingerprint, a ballistic 'fingerprint' changes with gun wear and can be purposely changed by a criminal. Because of this, the accuracy and effectiveness of such a database would be highly questionable. The only sure thing ballistic 'fingerprinting' delivers is a gun registration system."

On reading our report on the Public Safety Committee hearing last week, a BHB reader responded with the question, "Who in NY and/or Maryland said ballistic finger printing 'works' and which studies do they cite?" He was kind enough to attach a copy of a report (http://www.ag.ca.gov/newsalerts/2003/03-013_report.pdf) commissioned by the Attorney General of California. On the basis of that report, AG Bill Lockyer, no friend to gun owners, was forced to admit, "[O]ur analysis concludes that today's technology is not yet adequate to handle the volume associated with adding all new guns to the database and still provide useful information for investigators."

So, let's review. Ballistic fingerprinting is too expensive, we don't have the manpower resources or storage space to handle it and it's unreliable. Why, I ask, are we still expending legislative energy on this issue? At the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, I ask again, why can't we just enforce the laws we have on the books? There are plenty of them.

Here's a list of some of the firearms related bills before the legislature in this session.

S-1326 (By Ms. Jacques, a petition (accompanied by bill, Senate, No.1326) of Cheryl A. Jacques, David P. Linsky, Cynthia S. Creem, Paul C. Demakis and other members of the General Court for legislation to extend the ban on assault weapons and further reducing gun violence in the Commonwealth.) http://www.state.ma.us/legis/bills/st01326.htm

H-3387 (reducing gun violence) text not yet online
H-3388 (licensing) text not yet online
H-3389 (faulty handguns) text not yet online

Info? Contact Curt Lovelace - 978-425-6278 - curt@lifeworkforum.org

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