The Fallacy of Ballistic Fingerprinting

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Considering that it isn't hard to change fireing pins and barrles on most semi autos This was a big waste of time...

-Bill
 
"Ballistic Imaging" revealed as BS

Report Suggests Repealing Ballistics Law
By BRIAN WITTE
Associated Press Writer

BALTIMORE - A law requiring Maryland State Police to collect ballistics information from each handgun sold in the state has not aided a single criminal investigation and should be repealed, a state police report has concluded.
About $2.5 million has been spent on the program so far. Col. Thomas E. Hutchins, the state police superintendent, said he would prefer spending the money on proven crime-fighting techniques.

Maryland was the first state to adopt a ballistic fingerprinting law in April 2000. New York is the only other state to have such a database.

The Maryland law requires gun manufacturers to test-fire handguns and send a spent shell casing from each gun sold in the state to police. The casing's unique markings are entered into a database for future gun tracing.

"The system really is not doing anything," Hutchins said. "The guns that we find at crime scenes may not necessarily be the ones sold in Maryland, so there's nothing to compare it to anyway."

Sanford Abrams, vice president of the Maryland Licensed Firearms Dealers Association, added that the system only leads police to the person who bought the gun, when many guns used in crimes have been stolen.

The report also pointed to shortcomings in how ballistics information is sent to authorities. In one case, a gun dealer test-fired guns, rather than the guns' manufacturer, according to the report.

Gun-control groups favor ballistic fingerprinting systems, saying they are effective crime-fighting tools. Leah Barrett, executive director of CeaseFire Maryland, said state police are not using the database enough.

She said scrapping the state program could deal a setback to better ballistics imaging. "I think it's a real tragedy because other states are looking at New York and Maryland to see how we succeed with this," she said.

"Deal a setback" to a FAILURE? Just how is that possible? :rolleyes:
 
...

Many years ago, OH printed an ID Code on the little "yearly" registration sticker that goes on license plates. Essentially "Pica" type....

Imagine comparing a photo of that sticker taken when first applied to the car, and to a photo taken after a year of riding on the back of a car in the rust belt....

Now imagine that the ID sticker's on the front (bug-collecting) plate.... :eek:

THAT'S the bill-of-goods the BF people sold.... :fire:
 
I liken BF to tire print impressions

The variables being measured from that particular part (i.e., tire treads and barrel/chamber imperfections) will change due to normal and expected wear over time.

You can see the principle in action with new cars - you have to change the oil for a brand new car pretty soon after you buy it because the pistons & chambers are being "broken in" through initial wear during NORMAL USE.

Try matching a particular tire print taken at the factory to the SAME EXACT CAR years later - or even a piston "marking" taken at the factory - that's the problem with BF . . .
 
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Nope. Other states are looking at New York and Maryland and laughing.

Based upon this silly notion that BFP can be an effective crime fighting tool, those two states should have their names changed to Nude Dork and MerryLand.

When a liberal program fails, it seems the reasoning by liberals is that it just isn't being utilized enough or in the proper manner. This is why they actually go out an spend money to advertise to people that they are eligible for govt. services.
 
For what it SHOULD be used for (matching crime guns to unsolved shootings), the technology has a lot going for it, but as a wholesale attempt at back-door registration, it's a bad joke. All the system does is give you a list of the most similar cartridge casings or bullets entered into the database, and since the "time to crime" of most criminals' guns isn't very long at all, it does fairly well at matching them up; since those criminals' guns aren't going to be on any list of legally-owned firearms to begin with, it ends up looking for something that isn't going to be there in the first place (exhibit 1: Maryland). It's rare that criminals will bother to try to change the ballistic characteristics of a firearm they have in the first place, since most of them treat them as disposable commodities.
 
SDC:
What's your definition of "Time to Crime"? The time from when a criminal receives a gun to when he uses it in a criminal manner?

I've read that the average time to crime for a firearm in the USA is something like seven years from when it's sold out of the FFL dealer's shop.

Matching crime guns to unsolved shootings works better because you have the gun in custody, suspect what crimes it was used in, and can shoot similar ammo. Still, it reminds me of the penetration exams for children. I remember reading how when they finally got around to doing a clinical study (IE round up a bunch of non-sexually abused kids and examine them), something like half of the kids were "positive", as in showing signs of penetration, even though there was no evidence that any had happened otherwise. And this despite the exams being used as core evidence. Now, I have nothing against locking up pedophiles, but I wouldn't trust a test with a 50% false-positive rate.

Ballistic "fingerprints" change with the load, wear and tear on the gun, how long it has been since it was last cleaned, etc.

A good reference

The AB1717 Evaluation was designed to test the performance of the IBISâ„¢ system for the anticipated large database of new firearms. The experiment used 792 Smith & Wesson model 4006 semi-automatic pistols for this purpose. Each pistol was test fired using at least two cartridges of Federal brand ammunition and other ammunition. One of the test fired Federal cartridge cases for each of the pistols was registered into the database.

The duplicate Federal cartridge cases from fifty of these pistols were selected at random and compared with the database. The system ranks how well each entered mark matches the evidence. The higher the ranking the more similar the stored image is to the evidence’s mark. For the system to be successful, the correct gun should be listed in the top few ranks. The results show that 38 % of the fifty pistols were not listed in the top 15 ranks. The same experiments was repeated with ammunition of a different brands. In this case 62.5 % of the pistols were missed and not listed in the top 15 ranks. These results will be discussed in light of the investment in terms of equipment and personnel needed to set up a ballistic fingerprinting database. In fact, the trends in the obtained results show that the situation worsens as the number of firearms in the database is increased.
Click to expand...

If the system misses over a third of the guns when less than 800 guns are in the database, using the same ammunition lot, and over half with a different lot, how do you think it will function with 4 million guns, with all the customization available?
 
Sorry if I was vague about it, but I meant the time between when a criminal receives a specific firearm and when he/she actually USES it in a crime; this isn't ATF's definition, who only look at the period between the last OFFICIAL legal sale and the point where that firearm is picked up. To you or me, 1000 rounds might only be a long weekends' worth of shooting, but for most criminals, that's more than they fire in a lifetime (and certainly more than they fire out of any given firearm); the breech-face markings on even a cheapie die-cast Jennings don't change that much over a brick of ammo. The REAL problem with the system (and the reason why it only works reasonably well when you're looking at the relatively small numbers of firearms used/picked up as a result of crimes) is that the individual differences between each firearm are so small that all that entering EVERY gun into the system does is it gives you a larger pool of "possibles" to look at. Instead of looking only at 5 "probables", you're suddenly looking at 500 possibles, which leaves you at the same place where you are without the system in the first place. (Yes, I work on one of these systems, and I understand the arguments from both sides.)
 
Depends on what you mean by "directly attributable", P95; in my own experience, I can think of at least a half-dozen previously unsolved crimes that the system picked up on, that were enough to have a firearms and tool-marks examiner say "Yes, these crime-scene casings were fired out of the same gun that was taken off of Joe Blow after he was arrested for DUI/ADW/etc." In those cases, those matches would have never been made without the system, simply because it takes so long to confirm or eliminate a match by the old method (comparison microscope) that it WASN'T DONE as a matter of course; it was only after the system showed a high correlation between 2 known crime-scene or crime gun samples that the comparison was made.
 
Your memory is only half right. There have also been no crimes solved INDIRECTLY by this inane and expensive system. SBS, Crime scene database are an entirely different matter than a registry of the innocent.

On a slightly different note, what would the BFP people do if, say, you mailed in the entire top end of your 1911 along with the spent casing? I mean, just give it to them and never accept it back. Would they fingerprint that also, incase it is ever used in a crime? If I lived in a BFP state I'd consider buying a cheap RIA 1911 just to do that. Sort of like a protest vote. Maybe I'd send it to my state representative instead (the top end that is).
 
SDC - fair enough - I was not aware of actual results on a large scale from a broad geographic distribution POV. I am I guess considering for most part the status quo in MD ... maybe there, there have been no attributable or definitive successes, that I remember.

Certainly, when assessing the ''cost benefit'' it has always seemed a gross expenditure for little effect - other than to be a good way to hamper and control legit owners.
 
My experience is only with evidence within Canada, but I don't have any reason to believe that it's any different within NIBIN; for the "ballistic fingerprinting" baloney that was sold to NY & MD, there is another BIG problem that wasn't even considered at the time they jumped onto the snake-oil wagon. This is the problem of ensuring that the samples reported to be from a particular firearm ARE IN FACT FROM THAT FIREARM; in an AFTE experiment last year, they looked at 15 brand-new pistols that were being delivered to a local law-enforcement agency, each complete with their NY/MD-mandated "test-fire" casings. They compared those "test-fire" casings with test-fires that THEY THEMSELVES conducted out of each of those 15 pistols, and in 12 out of the 15, ONE OR BOTH of the shipped "test-fires" WEREN'T EVEN FIRED IN THE PISTOLS THEY WERE SHIPPED WITH. I've even heard of casings of the WRONG CALIBRE being shipped as "test-fires". :scrutiny: It was a bad idea to begin with, but with no way to ensure that garbage in doesn't equal garbage out, it becomes an even WORSE bad idea.
 
I agree with the others. From what I've read, the system can be reasonably used to attempt to connect different crime scenes together. A criminal using the same gun over time is also fairly likely to be using the same ammo. Consider that the standard walmart pack is 50-100 rounds, and that the standard criminal use is something like 3-4 rounds out of a semi-automatic.

This gives you merely thousands of cases from crime scenes, to be matched against guns recovered from criminals/mystrious sources. That can also be cleared from the database when you recover that gun.

Trying to register the guns of law-abiders only pollutes the database. Kinda like the spam traps in some web-pages. They generate lots of false addresses, reducing by orders of magnitude the number of valid email addresses in the collected database for email harvesters.

I just had a thought. What about reloaded cases? Can the database, having a couple cases from my 9mm back when it was new, generate a match using my cases that have been reloaded 5-9 times?

What happens if the crooks collect a few cases from a range, and after a shooting, the goblin gathers up his 2-3 cases (not too difficult inside with a minute or two of time), and scatters out a few cases from the range. Maybe all from the same person, maybe from different people. The cops then blow a week of investigation only to find out what happened.
 
I just had a thought. What about reloaded cases? Can the database, having a couple cases from my 9mm back when it was new, generate a match using my cases that have been reloaded 5-9 times?
Click to expand...

I've actually HAD a case like this, but not successfully concluded yet (with a charge, trial, and/or plea/conviction); the case I'm thinking of involved some random gunshots in a school-yard, and the responding officers were only able to find some casings at the scene. There were at least three identical ejector marks on one of the casings, telling me that that case had been fired in the same rifle at least three times (hand-cycling doesn't "stamp" the ejector-mark as deeply into the brass as firing it does), so I feel sure that whoever did this reloaded his brass and should've known better. Depending on the entry protocol for a site that enters your brass, you will get at least 5 images of each casing; primer/breech-face with light from directly above, primer/breech-face with light from 45 degrees (easier to scan visually), the firing-pin imprint, and the ejector-mark with the light coming from 3:00 and 6:00.
Your second "what if" is certainly in the realm of the possible, but you have to remember that we aren't exactly dealing with rocket scientists here; most of these people have trouble remembering to change their UNDERWEAR on anything resembling a daily basis, so collecting their fired brass or seeding "fake" brass involves a little more forethought than most of them are capable of. In most cases, these things happen on spur-of-the-moment or crimes of opportunity, and after the shootings over, all they want to do is GET THE HELL AWAY; if anything, they're thinking "OK, now I'll toss my piece in the river and get a new one by tomorrow morning, so I'll be clean, and I'll be ready for that sucker the next time I see him."
 
Leah Barret: How NOT to win friends/influence people

From WashPost 1/18/05:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16475-2005Jan17.html

Leah Barrett, executive director of CeaseFire Maryland, a gun-control group, said it would be a "tragedy for the whole field of ballistics imaging" if Maryland's ballistics program were scrapped.

She said that the program has technical flaws -- including the inability of local law enforcement agencies to directly access the state database -- but that with time and improved technology, it can yield important results for law enforcement.

"You just need a bit of imagination, a bit of skill and a bit of competence in your state police, as well as a bit of political courage, and frankly we're lacking that here in Maryland," she said.


Keep it up, Leah/Gail!!!! :evil:
 
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