CALNRA: UC Davis Study Finds Serious Flaws with Microstamping Technology

[MikeHaas]

NRA Members' Councils of California

CALNRA: UC Davis Study Finds Serious Flaws with Microstamping Technology
1:00 PM, 05/08/2007

As you may know, the California Legislature is currently considering AB 1471, Microstamping (Feuer). This bill would, commencing January 1, 2010, expand the definition of unsafe handgun to include semiautomatic pistols that are not designed and equipped with a microscopic array of characters that identify the make, model, and serial number of the pistol, etched into the interior surface or internal working parts of the pistol, and that are transferred by imprinting on each cartridge case when the firearm is fired.

Yesterday, CalNRA.com posted information regarding a May 2007 UC Davis study that found serious reliability problems with ID Dynamics' technology, concluding that Microstamping "...does not work well for all guns and ammunition tested in a pilot study by researchers from the forensic science program at UC Davis..."

Tests were performed with ".22, .380 and .40-caliber handguns, two semi-automatic rifles and a pump-action shotgun." The study reports "a wide range of results depending on the weapon, the ammunition used and the type of code examined."

Today, we add a CALNRA Analysis of the study. UC Davis' work seems to validate our objections to microstamping in several ways. Read more at:
http://calnra.com/legs.shtml?year=2007&summary=ab1471

Stay on top of other CA-related firearms issues at::
http://calnra.com/legs.shtml

Mike Haas

 

[obxned]

Kalifornica laws never are grounded in logic or science.

 

[sargenv]

The problem is, there are other states looking to California and are attempting to enact our goofy laws there..

Vince

 

[Creeping Incrementalism]

Mike, isn't this the third year in a row this bill has come up?

 

[Flyboy]

I found a flaw, too:

Revolvers

 

[SoCalShooter]

Well hopefully this study can be used to kill the new ammunition bill.

 

[Travis McGee]

The study reports "a wide range of results depending on the weapon, the ammunition used and the type of code examined."


Oh goody. That means they'll have to ban all of the guns it didn't work on.

 

[geekWithA.45]

The study's structure was flawed.

What they did was fire a number of rounds, knowing what the serial numbers where, and then determine how many digits on each casing was legible.

What they should have done was a double blind study: Serialize 10,000 rounds, writing the serial # on the case through non microstamp means.

Mix them up.

Assign them to 10 different guns, and fire them.

Then, mix all the expended brass together.

In comes the next crew, who knows nothing of this, and does their very best to read the microstamps, writing their interpretation down.

Their interpretations are then matched against a database containing the entire range of serial numbers.


Finally, using the serial numbers on the shells, not the microstamps, you tally the number of times you:

* Correctly identify the gun that fired the round
* Incorrectly identified an "innocent" gun(owner) as having fired the round
* Couldn't make head or tail of anything.


Only when those possibilities are accounted for can you tell the efficacy of the system.

 

[Standing Wolf]

Leftist extremists never tire of breathing new life into stupid ideas intelligent people abandoned long, long ago.

The most grandiose of their stupid ideas is socialism itself.

 

[Dorryn]

Dont be fooled, if they had the technology, they would singularly identify each and every bullet, case, firearm, primer, grain of powder, and person who bought them and be able to track them from manufacturer to scrap of lead buried in a backstop somewhere.

Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police.

-George Orwell, 1984, pg. 163.

 

[heron]

Dont be fooled, if they had the technology, they would singularly identify each and every bullet, case, firearm, primer, grain of powder, and person who bought them and be able to track them from manufacturer to scrap of lead buried in a backstop somewhere.

Which of course would only result in tracing the legally owned guns and ammo, not the stolen and smuggled ones. Gee, that'd help a lot, wouldn't it?

 

[jpk1md]

Actually they do have the technology...its just prohibitively expensive.

Serialization of casing and projectile is relatively simple but will be very expensive to do and survival of the ser #'s on projectile is not a sure thing.

This is the most likely strategy that we will see in 2008 in states like Cali, Ill, Md, NY etc.

Cali has already faced and defeated a serialization bill in recent years.

In Md we had a wacko Delegate try to propose this bill in 2007 but it was submitted late, it was poorly written and had major flaws...it didn't go anywhere in 2007 but it may come back in 2008.

 

[Dorryn]

Which of course would only result in tracing the legally owned guns and ammo, not the stolen and smuggled ones. Gee, that'd help a lot, wouldn't it?

Im not really sure if youre being sarcastic against my post, or against the type of politicians, LEOs, and others who might attempt such.

Regardless, this *is* to be feared, as I do not want anyone, particularly not an authority figure possibly connected to the government, to be able to continuously monitor and/or track what I do/use. If they were able to identify every piece of equipment or materiél I have ever possessed and its disposition, it would not be difficult to confiscate them "for my own good".

 

[stevemis]

Nobody has considered what effect this might have on the reloading industry. Would it be legal, or possible, to remove an imprint from a case as part of remanufacturing? If a case is recovered from a crime scene and has multiple imprints, I can see a whole lot of innocent people getting the third degree.

 

[FieroCDSP]

How much do we know of the whole process on this? The only place I can think of that would provide a decent place to apply such a microstamp is the face of the bolt/chamber. As the case is fired, it'd slam into the face and get the stamp. The problem I see is with fouling, especially in autoloaders. My pistol gets a lot of residue on the face, and any amount of crud there would fill in the grooves, and make the system worthless. Even after cleaning it would likely still be illegible. All you'd have to do is make sure you don't clean your gun? I'm sure a lot of gangstas sit there every night, cleaning their Glocks after "capping" a rival gangsta.

 

[ConfuseUs]

So the gangstas will learn to strip their new firearms, apply valve grinding compound to the bolt face, and reassemble. Then they can maintain or not maintain all they want. Or, alternatively, they may buy replacement barrels, slides/bolts and use those to commit crimes with. I personally doubt that the learning curve of gang members is as flat as a board.

 

[LaEscopeta]

So the gangstas will learn to strip their new firearms, apply valve grinding compound to the bolt face, and reassemble. Then they can maintain or not maintain all they want. Or, alternatively, they may buy replacement barrels, slides/bolts and use those to commit crimes with. I personally doubt that the learning curve of gang members is as flat as a board.

Many will do this, just like many criminals wear gloves or tape to avoid leaving fingerprints. But many other criminals do not, and hundreds (thousands?) are convicted each year because couldn’t/didn’t figure out how not to leave finger prints. Likewise we can expect some criminals to be able to defeat some case/bullet marking technology (assume a practical/working technology is ever developed) but not all. The steps listed above are similar to the steps that prevent matching bullets/casings from being matched to a particular forearm by looking at the marking left on the casing/bullet.

As stated above the technology exists to put a serial number on each bullet/casing when it is manufactured, but it is prohibitively expensive, both to manufacture and to keep track on all the numbers. Weather any sort on microstamping technology ends up as a useful law enforcement tool or not depends on a reasonably percentage of criminals have a learning curve flat enough to keep them from defeating the technology, and a reasonable cost to manufacture and administrate the system.

 

[ZeSpectre]

You know, if microstamping became common I've wondered just what fraction of a second it would take for "brass catchers" of all types/makes/models to appear on the market.

You'd have a decent period of time before they'd try to make them illegal as well (not that the criminals would care).

 

[Mannix]

This is the answer! I mean possession of an unsafe firearm on top of armed robbery and murder, that's sure to stop a criminal. [/sarcasm]

Another hole in it is that slapping an "unsafe firearm" charge on someone on top of another criminal charge could be considered in violation of the 5th amendment(self incriminating evidence and all). So unless they throw that out with the 2nd, which wouldn't be out the the question for California, this law serves only to keep honest people honest, even more so than your average gun control law.