NanoVia puts its finger on ballistics identification
                         
In the past several weeks, the idea of fingerprinting bullets has come to the fore, as a sniper has preyed on random victims in the
greater Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.
NanoVia LP, a Londonderry, N.H., company, is marketing a process it has invented that could give law enforcement personnel the ability
to definitively determine from which gun a bullet has been fired.

NanoVia traditionally deals in high-speed microelectronic and semiconductor processing technology. The company’s foray into ballistics fingerprinting has been ongoing for several years, but only recently has met with any serious feedback.
Todd Lizotte, NanoVia’s vice president of research and development, explained that some of the company’s employees developed the idea
almost a decade ago.                            “Some of us here are gun enthusiasts to some degree and, back in ’93, we came up with the idea of micromachining codes on firearms
that would link shell casings to the guns that fired them,” Lizotte said. “We figured we could put a microscopic identifying code on the
gun that would be undetectable to the human eye. That code could then be transferred to the shell casing when the gun is fired.”
A typical action taken by criminals is filing off the serial number of a gun so that police cannot specifically identify it if it is recovered.
Lizotte said the NanoVia team took the serial number approach and decided it could be stamped onto the shell casing when the gun is fired.
To offer proof of concept, the team etched a tiny code onto the firing pin of the gun, which strikes the primer, igniting the gunpowder inside the cartridge and firing the bullet. When the firing pin hits the primer, it creates a dimple in the metal disc. When NanoVia fired test shots, the identifying code was clearly stamped onto the primer of the ejected cartridge.“We machined the firing pins using a laser technique, and after we fired the gun we put the casing under the microscope and there
was a perfect stamped image of the code,” Lizotte said. “We think the technique has a very long extended lifetime and would work for
upward of 30,000 firings.”


[url]http://www.masshightech.com/displayarticledetail.asp?art_id=60863&search[/url]

Oh yeah I like this approach ...

Lets see instead of 25.1 grains I'll run 25.5 so I get a little primer flow...

Some people never learn

Ryan

So how much material would one need to file off the face of your firing pin to make this USELESS??

as usual, law-abiding citizens - that do not commit crimes - will comply with another stupid law, and as usual, criminals will ignore the law and change the firing pin.

given that scenario, firing pins must be registered to comply with 'primer stamping' laws, it would be illegal to change a firing pin, pre-ban / post-ban firing pins....??

is there no end to the money-wasting stupidity that people come up with?

And these guys call themselves "Firearms enthusiasts"!?

I would not be against serializing the inside of the chamber, [b]IF IT ISN'T MANDATORY[/b], and [b]IF RECORDS ARE NEVER KEPT![/b]  That way it could never become "registration, and matching cases to firearms could still happen.  This would be far more reliable than the current system they have of matching cases to guns.